Exhibition Tour: American Sampler Activating the Archive with Matthew Countryman
Professor Matthew Countryman will lead a conversation about American Sampler: Activating the Archive. This research-driven, immersive exhibition in UMMA’s Vertical Gallery is a collaboration with the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of anarchism, protest, and social movements housed in the U-M Library’s Special Collections Research Center.
The exhibition centers on 1950s–1970s movements for Black freedom, civil rights, and antiwar activism, clarifying the aspirations and effects as well as the violent opposition these movements encountered. American Sampler invites visitors to examine how legacies of grassroots organizing and protest in U.S. history shape the present.
More About
Matthew Countryman
Matthew J. Countryman is Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and of History at the University of Michigan. Countryman is the author of Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia which won the 2006 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book in civil rights history from the Organization of American Historians. He is also the author of “2020 Uprisings, Unprecedented in Scope, Join a Long River of Struggle in America,” in the online magazine, The Conversation, and of “Of Little Rocks and Levittowns: The Northern Racial Landscape and the Origins of 1960s Student Activism,” in A New Insurgency; The Port Huron Statement and its Times (2015).
Countryman is currently serving as co-Principal Investigator of the African-American Student Project sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Inclusive History Project and is a member of the Rackham Graduate School’s Reparative Justice Research Group. He is a founding member of the Black Washtenaw County Collaboratory, a community-campus collaboration dedicated to documenting and recounting histories of racial segregation and African American community building in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan, and has served as a consulting historian for the public history website, “Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia.”
SUPPORT
Lead support for American Sampler is provided by Joseph and Annette Allen, Nicole and Matthew Lester, Erica Gervais Pappendick and Ted Pappendick, Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Barbara Timmer, Susan and Richard Gutow, U-M Arts Initiative, U-M Institute for the Humanities, the Mary L. Wolter Welz Fund, and the Marvin H. and Mary M. Davidson Endowed Fund. Additional generous support is provided by U-M CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund, U-M Phillip J. Bowman Center for Scholarship to Practice, U-M Initiative for Democracy & Civic Empowerment, U-M Department of History, and U-M Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
