Schomburg Center Welcomes First Fellow to its Newly-Opened Lapidus Center

MARCH 9, 2015: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research division of The New York Public Library, is pleased to announce the appointment of scholar Natalie Joy as the inaugural fellow of its newly opened Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery. 

A native of Idaho, Joy is currently on leave at Northern Illinois University, where she is an Associate Professor of History. Within the fellowship, Joy will be exploring the relationship between Native Americans and the American antislavery movement from the 1820s to the 1850s to help write her book, entitled Abolitionists and Indians in the Antebellum Era. Her fellowship will run through June 2015.

 "I am honored and thankful to be the recipient of a long-term Lapidus Center fellowship,” says Joy. “It has given me the gift of time and space to work exclusively on my book. I am also pleased to have access to the incredible resources of the Schomburg Center."

Notes Dr. Sylviane Diouf, director of the Lapidus Center: “Natalie’s project elegantly brings together African American history and Native American history. It tackles, among many others, the inconvenient issue of Indian slaveholders involved in anti-slavery movements as they fight Indian Removal that would allow the expansion of slavery.”

Funded by a generous $2.5 million gift from Ruth and Sid Lapidus and matched by The New York Public Library, the Lapidus Center is the only facility of its kind based in a public research library. The Center's mission is to generate and disseminate scholarly knowledge on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery pertaining to the Atlantic World. Given the centrality of Atlantic slavery to the making of the modern world, the Lapidus fellowships ensure that slavery studies are a cornerstone of the Schomburg Center’s broader research community and provide a counterbalance to the contemporary direction of scholarship in African American and African Diaspora studies.

The Lapidus Center offers two long-term fellowships (six months) to assist scholars whose research on transatlantic slavery can benefit from extended access to the Schomburg Center’s resources; and up to five short-term fellowships (three months) to support visiting scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area. 

The gift also includes 400 rare items of printed material, making the Schomburg Center home to one of the world’s premier collections of slavery material. Located in Harlem, New York, the Schomburg Center is the world’s leading repository of African and African diasporic artifacts, with over ten million items in its collection to date.

Some of the items in the new Lapidus collection include:

  • A 1778 "Bill of Sale" to a freed black man, only identified as Adam, in New Jersey for the sale of his daughter, Jenny.
  • A proclamation by King Charles II prohibiting the trade of enslaved persons between the American colonies.
  • A 1792 first-edition anti-abolition pamphlet, along with a rebuttal to aforementioned pamphlet, allegedly written by political activist and Common Sense author, Thomas Paine.
  • The 1815 memoirs of abolitionists Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford,  two of the earliest public advocates for the emancipation of the enslaved Africans from the colonial period.
  • Rare, first-edition 1689 copy of complaints submitted by Edward Littleton, one of Barbados’ largest landowners, of Britain’s excessive taxation of its sugar trade
  • Poems from 1809 on the abolition of the slave trade

For more information about the Lapidus Center and the fellowships, please visit Schomburgcenter.org/lapidus-center.

Media Contact:

Adenike Olanrewaju

adenikeolanrewaju@nypl.org

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, is generally recognized as one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world. For over 80 years the Center has collected, preserved, and provided access to materials documenting black life, and promoted the study and interpretation of the history and culture of peoples of African descent. Educational and Cultural Programs at the Schomburg Center complement its research services and interpret its collections. Seminars, forums, workshops, staged readings, film screenings, performing arts programs, and special events are presented year-round. More information about Schomburg’s collections and programs can be found at www.schomburgcenter.org.