[press release]
In the world of the Internet, slavery and the American
Civil War are explosive topics of debate, so Stephanie McCurry is preparing
to be globally fact-checked by those with a passion for the subject matter.
The University of Pennsylvania history professor and scholar will
teach a 10-week, massive open online course, or MOOC, called “History of the
Slave South.” It starts January 20.
So far, more than 10,000 people from around the world
have signed up for the free, online course.
McCurry, a specialist in 19th century American history,
with a focus on the South and the Civil War era and the history of women and
gender, is the author of numerous articles and review essays as well as two
books, including Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil
War South.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, she attended college
in Canada before moving to the United States for graduate school. She says that
her version of Civil War history is not a Southern history course offered by a
Southerner but rather a course taught by an outsider.
“I’ve always thought that’s why my version of it was
different and in some ways worth listening to,” she says. “It’s a gripping
story in the making of the modern world, how slavery becomes so tied up in the
generation of this enormous wealth by the 18th and 19th centuries,
but is such a different way of producing wealth than we associate with
modernity.”
For people who are not American and who don’t have direct
national or ancestral connections to the South, McCurry’s “History of the Slave
South” course will articulate what the stakes of slavery were in America.
She says that the course is a thematically concentrated
version of what she teaches at Penn. Each week, students will view two online
video lectures embedded with quiz questions. There will be weekly discussion
questions. Documents and primary sources will be read, with new assignments
given every two weeks.
McCurry says she believes that the time is right for a
global online course on the slave South given the renewed dialogue spurred by
the release of two major motion pictures. Last year’s “12 Years a Slave” and
the 2012 film “Django Unchained” explored the brutality and horrors of slavery
from the point of view of the enslaved.
McCurry recalls sitting in a theater in the Manayunk
section of Philadelphia watching “12 Years a Slave” with a mixed, largely
African-American audience. So powerful was the film that she felt silenced,
needing to listen, not talk.
She wonders if people can talk about America’s slave
history now because “we’ve hit this moment where people feel less directly
implicated because they weren’t part of segregation, for example.”
At Penn, McCurry teaches a wide variety
of undergraduate and graduate courses in American, Southern
and women's history and on the comparative history of slavery and emancipation.
A group of students enrolled in the online course have
started a Facebook page and a SlaveSouth MOOCTwitter account
@SlaveSouthMOOC. Course registration is available by clicking the Learn for
Free banner at https://www.coursera.org/course/slavesouth.