Douglas Bristol to Lecture on Success Secrets of 19th-Century Black Barbers

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Douglas Bristol

Professor Douglas Bristol of the University of Southern Mississippi will be participating in a class discussion at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 26, in CHEM 144, with several barbers from Skillz Unlimited Barbershop in Springdale.

They will be discussing popular representations of black barbershops in the film Coming to America and the Netflix series Luke Cage as a part of a course, African Americans in Film, taught by Constance Bailey, assistant professor of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Bristol will also be giving a lecture on the "Success Secrets of 19th-Century Black Barbers" at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 27, in CHEM 144. 

Bristol, a professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, is a scholar of the African American experience and race relations. His first book, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom, was reissued in paperback in 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press. In it, Bristol examines the relationship between black barbers and the prosperous white men whose throats they shaved with straight-edged razors, from the colonial period to the Great Migration.

He is co-editor of Integrating the U.S. Military: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation since World War II, published earlier this year by Johns Hopkins University Press, and he is currently working on his next book, The Black Greatest Generation: African American Men and Women in Uniform during World War II.