(excuse cross-listing)


1) Members of the list may be interested in several recent essays on slavery at Virginia universities.

		http://uvamagazine.org/features/article/unearthing_slavery_at_the_university_of_virginia

		My own contribution is now out as well; it explores the erratic nature of memory at W&M about slavery and argues that the views of Thomas Roderick Dew and his antebellum faculty here  marked a change from an earlier W&M antsier about slavery than has generally been known;  one witness to that era, Jefferson, seems to have hoped that the skepticism about slavery at the College might ultimately engender among its graduates some kind of efficacy in ending slavery. 

				http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol21/iss4/6/

		Colleagues who saw drafts of my work seem divided on it.  I've been told I'm too gentle, too genteel with W&M (one told me I'm just an old white guy sucking up to the institution that pays his salary);  another said that everything I say is true, but that what I write isn't history, or rather it is history--but history written by an English professor.  

	A question was addressed to me too as to who owns the narrative, more pointedly whether a white man descended from an old Williamsburg slave-owning family (I'm a Ballard, as we in Virginia say) has any standing to write about the local history of slavery.  

	One or two others have been more complimentary.

	Anyway, for what it's worth, there it is.



2) In connection with this, has any work been done on the University of Richmond and its involvement, if any, with slavery?





	
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Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia  23187              757-221-3932

		http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/   

		http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
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       Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both.   Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
            															 --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."

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