"The Porch Archives and Black Civil War Memory": History Department's 2026 Donovan Lecture

Hilary N. Green, the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College, will present "The Porch Archives of Black Civil War Memory" as the 2025-2026 Timothy Donovan Lecturer at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 2, in the Honors Auditorium (Gearhart Hall 026).

Professor Green will explore how the African American porch and other communal archival practices allowed for diverse Black communities to remember the Civil War and its legacies in complex ways. By engaging with these communal sites of memory as well as traditional archives, Green offers a new direction for scholars and broader communities to deepen their understanding of Civil War memory. As she explains, "Collectively, African American alternative public spaces, whether the porch, church or segregated classroom, served as important spheres of African American Civil War commemorative culture. By refusing to forget, everyday African Americans rejected local, regional and, at times, national impulses encouraging them to accept white understandings of the Civil War and their racial subordination in the politicized Civil War commemorative landscape."

Green's lecture is drawn from her recent Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (2025), which the Journal of Southern History has praised as "a significant contribution to Civil War memory studies. By blending personal narrative with scholarly analysis while highlighting the importance of porch archives and oral traditions as sources, Green models a method of historical practice that centers Black people in Civil War memory, treating them as more than an afterthought."

Green is also the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (2016), co-author of Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865-1900 (2022) and co-editor of The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (2024). Before joining the faculty at Davidson, she taught at Elizabeth State University and University of Alabama. Green is the chief reader for the AP U.S. history exam.

The Donovan Lecture Series is named in honor of Timothy Donovan, former professor and chair of the Department of History at the U of A, and has brought leading U.S. historians to campus. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Alumni Distinguished Chair lecture series, the African and African American Studies Program and the U of A Humanities Center.