2022 Balch Library Series

Andy will be presenting three talks in early 2022.  The talks will include:

Slavery (January 26, 2022)

Millions of Africans, forcibly removed from their home continent, were until two centuries ago exported to labor as property in the mines and plantations of the New World.  Their forced labor produced the flood of wealth that changed the economies of the old world, prompted industrialization, and foresaw today’s global economy.  Determined efforts to outlaw and ultimately to eliminate this criminal business finally succeeded in the early 19th century, thanks in part to policing by the Royal and United States Navies.

Their forced labor produced the flood of wealth that changed the economies of the old world, prompted industrialization, and foresaw today’s global economy.  Determined efforts to outlaw and ultimately to eliminate this criminal business finally succeeded in the early 19th century, thanks in part to policing by the Royal and United States Navies.

Through the Dark Continent, Henry Morton Stanley and the Exploration of Africa (March 16, 2022)

Stanley’s successful search in 1871 for the Scottish medical missionary, David Livingstone, was a newspaper circulation-building caper funded by the N.Y. Herald’s publisher.  Its brilliant success, Stanley’s subsequent bold trek east to west across Central Africa in 1874-77, and his later services to Leopold II made him famous, and thrust Africa indelibly into the consciousness of the western world.

Congo, the Miserable Expeditions and Dreadful Death of Lt. Emory Taunt, USN (April 27, 2022)

Former Navy Lieutenant Taunt’s third time in the Congo, as the first resident American diplomat in equatorial Africa, ended in January 1891 with his death along the great river, the familiar fate then of many Europeans in King Leopold’s private estate.  His life and times at the end of that century open a window today on the tragic history of this deeply troubled nation.