In 1974, Peter H. Wood published Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion, a pioneering work that presaged a generation of innovative scholarship on African American history. Fifty years later, W.W. Norton is reissuing an anniversary edition of the book, with a new Introduction by Imani Perry. In this roundtable, Wood joins five young Black scholars to discuss the past and future of African American historiography. Wood observed in Black Majority that over the course of his research, “it became increasingly clear that the role of the black majority was major rather than minor, active rather than passive.” African Americans, he wrote, “played a significant and often determinative part in the evolution of the colony.” Much of the social history that followed drew on Wood’s insights. Since then, the field has evolved in significant ways. It is now transnational; it has incorporated women’s and gender studies; and it has experimented with genre and pushed beyond archival documents written by white hands.

At the same time, the nation’s politics have changed. The Second Reconstruction inspired much of the social history of the 1970s. Black Lives Matter now calls for another reckoning with the nation’s long, terrible history of slavery and Jim Crow. As historians learn from Black Lives Matter, what new directions might they pursue in their research? What new questions might they ask? And what can they learn from the previous fifty years of historiography and from Black Majority?

Justene Hill Edward (UVA), Adam McNeil (Rutgers), Nicole Maskiell (University of South Carolina), and Derrick Spires (Cornell) bring a broad range of interests and approaches to these questions, ranging from media and literary studies to economic and social history. The session will be chaired and moderated by Alexander X. Byrd, who studied with Wood many years ago and is now the Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Rice University. The roundtable will bring together old and new voices and offer an opportunity to reflect on where the field has been and where it might go.