Calendar - History

Apr 6, 2026: Justene Hill Edwards, "The Freedman’s Bank and the (Un)Making of Reconstruction" at Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:30:00 -0400

On July 2, 1874, a bank closed its doors. The 61,144 depositors, many of whom poured their life’s savings into this financial institution, collectively lost almost $3 million. In the nineteenth century, a single bank failure did not typically garner national attention. However, this bank was no ordinary financial institution. It served a particularly vulnerable population of people: African Americans recently freed from slavery. The bank that closed was the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman’s Bank. It was a private financial institution founded by white bankers and philanthropists at the end of the Civil War to introduce formerly enslaved people to the basic tenets of American banking. When it failed in 1874, its Black depositors lost access to the hard-earned savings that would have helped their climb out of slavery. They also lost faith in the promise of banking to build wealth and economic security.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is a specialist in African American history and her research examines Black economic life in America. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. She has won numerous fellowships and awards, most recently the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the Mellon New Directions Fellowship. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, M.A. from Florida International University, and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

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Apr 10, 2026: 21st Annual Marco Institute Symposium: The Roland Tradition at Howard Baker Center

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

The Marco Symposium is the Marco Institute’s premier annual event, held every year in March or April. The Symposium brings leading experts in their field to the University of Tennessee for two days of talks on that year’s theme, and concludes with a round-table discussion by all the participants. The topic of the 21st annual Marco Symposium, organized jointly with the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale at the Université de Poitiers, is The Roland Tradition: From History to Legend, from King Charles to Stephen King, organized by Matthew Bryan Gillis (History), Pascale Drouet (Université de Poitiers), and Anne-Hélène Miller (Riggsby Director).

The 2026 Symposium explores the dynamic tradition of the eponymous hero from The Song of Roland. Scholars of literature and languages, history, music, film, art history and religion examine numerous manifestations of Roland from his medieval beginnings as Charlemagne’s brave, but betrayed paladin to Stephen King’s famous gunslinger, Roland Deschain, from The Dark Tower series.

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Apr 10, 2026: Dr. James Coltrain, "Choices Matter – The Academy and the Future of Historical Games" at Student Union

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:00:00 -0400

In this talk, historian and game designer Dr. James Coltrain will discuss his experience developing the award-winning historical mystery game Blackhaven, practical strategies for building new humanities games, and how historians and humanists can use their expertise to inspire growing and unreached audiences.

This talk is sponsored by the Digital Gaming research seminar hosted by the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts and scheduled in coordination with the 2026 VoLAN tournament.

James Coltrain is an Associate Professor of Digital Media and Design at the University of Connecticut, and the founder and lead developer of an independent studio, Historiated Games. His first game Blackhaven, a historical mystery, was released in 2021 and received awards and honors from Indiecade, the Independent Games Festival, and Games for Change. Trained as a historian, Coltrain’s work seeks to expand the reach of public history by invigorating games for broad audiences with the richness of archivally grounded humanities research.

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Apr 11, 2026: 21st Annual Marco Institute Symposium: The Roland Tradition at Howard Baker Center

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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Apr 13, 2026: Aaron Landsman, "Perfect City Primer: Theater as Civic Action, Mapping as Embodied Knowledge" at Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:30:00 -0400

How is a government meeting a performance of power? What can we learn and achieve by performing it differently? How do the maps we carry in our body lead us toward new approaches to policy? What happens if we make maps together and then share our different experiences of navigating the same space?

Aaron Landsman shares examples from a body of work called Perfect City, that includes the participatory theatrical work City Council Meeting, the curriculum and toolkit for civic action that arises from that work, and the book The City We Make Together, co-authored with Mallory Catlett, and published by the University of Iowa Press.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Aaron Landsman is a multidisciplinary artist. His new and recent work includes Night Keeper, an immersive performance and vinyl LP about insomnia as urban communion, All the Time in the World, a cooperative card game that turns social media into an ensemble performance, and the ongoing body of work Perfect City, at the intersection of art, civic engagement and urban planning. Landsman is a Lecturer at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts.

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Apr 20, 2026: Avinoam Patt, "The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Calendar of Holocaust Memory " at Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:30:00 -0400

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943–May 16, 1943), the largest mass revolt in a major city in Nazi-occupied Europe, is the defining symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II. In the days and weeks after the uprising broke out, the news of the revolt captivated the Jewish world, and was seized upon by Jews from diverse ideological backgrounds and movements in locations around the world as the news they had been waiting and wanting to hear for almost four years. Even at the time of the Uprising, the ghetto fighters who organized the revolt were aware of the historic significance of their actions. Described by historian Israel Gutman, who himself was a participant in the revolt, as “literally a revolution in Jewish history (whose) importance was understood all too well by those who fought,” the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising quickly became the focal point of commemorative activities both during and immediately after the war, appropriated by Holocaust survivors in Europe as the basis for commemoration activities in the DP camps, by leaders in the Yishuv as confirmation of the Zionist worldview, and in the American context, as the “prism through which American Jews performed the memory of the six million” in commemorative activities in the first two decades after World War II. By 1953, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, would designate the 27th of Nisan as the date for Yom HaShoah ve-haGevruah (The Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) to correspond with the timing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In this talk, Avinoam Patt will reflect on how and why April 19 became the focal point of Jewish memory of the Holocaust, and how the calendar of Holocaust memory has evolved since then.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies program and the Department of Religious Studies.

Avinoam Patt is the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University where he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of multiple books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2009) and The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt (2021). He is also co-editor of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020) and Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020). His newest books include Israel and the Holocaust (2024) and the document collection, The Surviving Remnant: Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2024).

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Apr 23, 2026: Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy during the American Revolution at Student Union

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Milton M. Klein Lecture in History

with guest speaker Dr. Ronald A. Johnson

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances, Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

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Apr 23, 2026: Pratima Gopalakrishnan, “Indian Ocean Trade in the 11th and 12th Centuries: A View from the Cairo Geniza"

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:00:00 -0400

Pratima Gopalakrishnan is a historian of the Indian Ocean who works with documents from the Cairo Geniza. She has additional interests in labor and gender, and she is also a scholar of rabbinic texts. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University, with a Certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She works as a Senior Researcher and Project Coordinator for the “Indian Ocean Documents from the Cairo Geniza” project at the Princeton Geniza Lab. Prior to working at the PGL, Gopalakrishnan held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Texas at Austin and Duke University. She also held visiting fellowships at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research and the Katz Center for Judaic Studies.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Jewish merchants — many of them originally from North Africa but with families that had settled in Fustat (Old Cairo) for one or more generations — were involved in long-distance trade of goods to and from the Indian Ocean littoral. The goods that passed east and west in this trade included dozens of varieties of textiles, botanical products and spices, metal objects and household items. This lecture explores the lives of these merchants and of the goods for which they risked perilous land and sea voyages. Jewish merchants often went via Nile and Red Sea ports all the way to present-day Gujarat and the Malabar coast to sell and buy goods. They kept records of their commercial transactions — shot through with their hopes and fears — in hundreds of letters, accounts and legal documents that were deposited in the Cairo Geniza. This lecture considers what these records can tell us about the merchants, as well as the free and enslaved laborers, middlemen, and the merchants’ own families back home who made their ventures possible.

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May 14, 2026: Scholars to Storytellers at Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts is pleased to host a one-day "Scholars to Storytellers" workshop, led by John Ghazvinian, a historian, journalist, and Knopf (PenguinRandomHouse) author.

The day-long workshop is designed for scholars interested in moving from academic research projects to commercial publishing, guiding authors from conceptualizing the project to publication. Workshop topics will include working with literary agents, types of books sought by trade publishers, and the different aims and audiences of trade publishing.

Please submit a 250-word summary of a current research project and statement of interest, along with an updated 2-page CV to the Denbo Center at humanitiesctr@utk.edu by email no later than 5pm on May 1, 2026.

Contact the Denbo Center at 974-9921 or humanitiesctr@utk.edu for more information.

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Nov 11, 2026: Veterans Day for UTK Veterans at John C Hodges Library

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 09:00:00 -0500

All UTK students and faculty and staff who are veterans are welcome to free food and drinks at the Veterans Success Center on November 11 from 9am to 10am. The UTK Special Collections staff will be displaying some of the military memorabilia that has been donated to the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and War over the past four decades. We will be showing interviews with Tennessee veterans from World War 2 to the present day.

This event is for veterans only. We want to do more than thank veterans for their service.

The event is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Tenneseans and War, the Veterans Success Center, and the Department of History.

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