This event and provided the video. Its my pleasure to introduce nicole and her book, Nicole Turner is assistant professor of religious studies at yale university. She earned her p. H. D. In history at the university of pennsylvania, her masters in divinity at Union Theological seminary in new york and her bachelors degree from Political Science from howardford college and is the author this 2020 book, soul liberty the evolution of black religious politics in post emancipation virginia published any the university of North Carolina press. And before asking if nicole the first question, i want to mention this book appears in this kind of conventional version of a hard copy but also has two other versions and part of what makes her work so interesting is its so engaged with digital humanity. The book also exists as a conventional, sort of conventional she describes it verbatim open access ebook and also as an enhanced open access ebook which has which shows off what dr. Turner was able to do with mapping and kind of Digital Technology in order to develop her research findings. So one of the things i hope well get to talk about today is how she worked with those sources and what kind of promise she thinks digital humanities holds for this kind of research into africanAmerican History in particular. So just to get us started off, dr. Turner, tell us a little bit about this book. How do you describe this book to people who dont know anything about it, what are its main arguments, what does it accomplish, and how do you see it kind of contributing to the general conversation . That was a lot of questions. Lets start with give us your general kind of pitch about this book and what essential claims are. Nicole this book first of all, i want to say thank so you much for having me as part of the series part of a wonderful series of other scholars to be here but appreciate it to talk about my work. In the book soul liberty is about the evolution of black religious politics and the main how is to his torize blacks became political and there are stories of how they became politically engaged and my work was to their eight that process and wasnt always engaged in the same ways and that black churches are in fact historical stages that have changed across time and changed in the reconstruction and what s the main aim of the book is. Thank you so much. Well be bouncing back and forth. So i dont mean to catch you from two different sides. But really delighted to read the book and really exciting and i have about nine million questions so im going to ask them all at once and talk really fast. Ive got to be patient for all the things that i want to ask later. Bg building off of what you just said, i wonder if you can help us understand by what you mean by soul liberty . Its not just a lovely title but also a concept you turn to over in the book and seems to speak to some of these intersections youre so interested in religion and politics and how they shape each other. I wonder if you can get us started on what that means in your work . Nicole sure, thank you. So soul liberty comes from a quote in the Virginia Baptist Association minutes where the members of the convention were citing Roger Williams pursuit of soul liberty in the formation of rhode island. What is interesting about the use of that term is its not only a term that applies to the black baptists as a part of the udy but applies to black episcopalians and the black Apostolic Church that started in southern virginia and southern North Carolina. But it is an idea of religious freedom and the idea black people could worship when, where and with whom they chose and also points to this idea of equity and justice and richeseness they were pursuing in their prg communities and in the public landscape. The term originally comes from a very particular baptist concept is also that applies to the black baptist and Virginia Baptist State Conventions and the black episcopalians who attended the grant Theological School which was the first black seminary for black mine its and priests in the episcopal tradition and the zions of Apostolic Church one of few black denominations started in the south, one of and ly ones in the south pursued this idea to worship as so fit and also the idea of freedom, equity and justice. Gregory your answer captured i think many of the really fascinating aspects of it, one of which that particularly struck me and you note in your own text and in your own notes is that the pursuit of liberty at first glance might read as liberty to worship separate from white interference which certainly is an important part of the story but also a liberty that allows for quite different types of formation in the religious world and i was interested in, you know, you write about the ways for understandable reasons baptists in the a. M. E. Church so centrally in the literature which makes perfect sense and yet other religious experiences, the episcopalians whom you mentioned or the africanamericans of the m. E. C. Which developed later and others seem to be harder to pin down in the literature. And what is it you think we gain when we study people who choose to operate in what seems to be a completely africanamerican state but to remain within a white dominated denomination . What is it that we as a historian, what drew you to those faces as well . Nicole i hear in your question a couple things, one has to do with the definition of liberty and what has to do with the differences in the denominations and their approaches. And i would say first that this comes only to see this landscape comes from doing a sort of geographical look, a study that begins in a particular place in virginia and sort of not picking the lens of a particular denomination and didnt come to it only through the lens of baptists but looking at the landscape of virginia which yielded up all three of these different denominations. And when you start to think about how each of these religious communities chose to pursue freedom, you know, becomes really evident that for the baptists, part of the trajectory of their struggle goes through, you know, the beginning where black baptists are organized already in nventions before the vote is established by the 16th amendment but they are already making arguments for their political participation and for their skill, something that was absent before emancipation and black people were organizing in the associations and they have sort of demonstrated the skill to participate as citizens through their own religious communities. But then you find, you know, a very interesting story of Saint Stevens Episcopal Church in st. Petersburg, pennsylvania, started by a black woman who in complication with a white priest from a church that her family became members of establishes an independent black church, one of the first black Episcopal Churches for the community in st. Petersburg and its an interesting story because i think a lot of people tend to associate the amiss copal church of a high culture of a inflated preblack community and dont tend to associate black typical church with black women leadership. And for instance, you have black people like caroline bragses who membered teabt the church and george brag to become interested in the black Freedom Church which drew me to the Political Landscape and george bragg becomes involved in the movement and becomes sort of a critical agent in narrating black history and reflects how the struggle for black freedom took place in many spaces, whether it was black baptists who were establishing their own independent spaces and churches and associations or if it was black episcopalians sort of navigating the landscape of engaging with former confederates as george bragg did as a student at the brandt Theological School as a participant in the readjusted movement and really opens up a way of thinking of how did my people go about forming this type of alliance and one of the things that drew me to this particular case of virginia is how did they form this alliance. So i think one of the things that becomes evident in the struggle is real in all these spaces, black people struggling for freedom and finding ways to achieve it in these various locations. Kate thanks so much, nicole. This is so interesting, now the vast majority of your book takes us into the post civil war period. Youre really talking and the title picks up the post event emancipation moment but wanted to have you talk a little bit about that transition from slavery to freedom. Youre talking about an area in virginia where the vast majority of africanamericans before the civil war were enslaved though there were free black people as well and how would you describe for us for readers what that transition looked like, what were the aspects of black religious experiences during the time of slavery that informed what team did after emancipation and what were the particular challenges that people faced as slavery came to an end during the civil war and afterwards and how do you understand and see that transition . Nicole thank you. I think the transition can be seen best by thinking in part the longstanding narratives of black Church Engagement and sort of thinking about how it is in the antivolunteerism there were independent black churches where black people were able to worship, independent churches and that they were able to develop leadership skills and one of the things we start to see happening in the post emancipation landscape is debate about landownership and property and so theres a really interesting aspect of thinking about black landownership of something that came first to churches and that black people were starting to navigate the legal system through trying to secure ownership by title and formal ownership of churches they actually made into help support and develop economically but didnt have the right to sort of full name ownership, on the deed type of situation. Part of that transition involves a transition to property ownership. Part of what you see transforming in the post emancipation period has to do a little bit with gender roles. One of the other things i wanted to highlight in this moment is how gender roles were being established in Church Communities and so part of what you can see or what i try to convey in telling the story of the Baptist Church in st. Petersburg and listen closely to the landscape of the meetings in the church is how gender roles were actually being transformed in that moment. And so one of the things i focused on in looking at the ses of unwed pregnancy which in these meetings handled different kind of issues but focused on the case of unwed pregnancy because there is a clear transformation in how the community initially didnt, you know, hold both parties accountable for a woman being pregnant out of wedlock for a brief moment in time they do allow for both parties to be ld accountable and then they shifted back to go back to being held accountable and what happened as a result is women moved back to the space of only being dependent in Church Meetings and you see the rise of a centralized figure who is male and who has a particular sort of gender status. I think there are ways in which the leadership roles change and expand, how access to land and property is something that changes through the churches across this time and also how gender roles are being transformed on the landscape of institutions. Kate just to follow up on that question of gender roles, i feel like you make reference to the work, work on a later period of, for instance, Linda Gilmore and to some extent Barkley Brown about kind of an argument that either gender roles among africanamericans particularly in churches became more kind of what we now understand to be conventional ideas about male leadership and female women kind of being a part of the church but not being in leadership roles and conventional ideas about gender respectability that that emerged later in the 1890s or so and im just wondering, you know, do you see what youre finding is suggesting that all of the things that people said came about later actually happened earlier . And also i think that raises a question which is interesting and kind of repeated in a lot of different places that historians have suggested that the immediate post emancipation period was a period of greater experimentation around gender hierarchy among africanamericans kind of coming out of slavery, that there was more fluidity and more conversation because of, for example, so many families and marriages had been interrupted by the domestic slave trade and now you have this moment of more flexibility, are we finding something really different from that here . Nicole yes, i think the short answer is yes, when you look at the petersburg landscape you see the imposition of gender roles taking place much earlier. I think the question is not necessarily one of only time period but also place and also circumstance and also of particular leadership model, and you know, one of the things i talked about in the study and acknowledged is this is a look, a deep look at a particular community. And we need many more studies and many more locations in order to see these transformations and how they emerged. Yes, i definitely think in this particular case its a challenge to sort of thinking how gender roles could be transformed much earlier and in this particular instance, finding this cache of churches that really revealed what was taking place on the ground in this community was very instructive, you know, that people were having various experiences of how gender was being transformed during that time. Gregory one of the places that we see that is in the conventions and conferences in these other organizational and networking levels. And you know, well come back to this in a little bit when we turn to mapping but staying on the level of more of your argument, i want to say first, i think one of the joys in reading this book and in reading other books of history that have this deep grab you laterity of seeing a history granularity of seeing a historians, some of them rush past because they dont see it interesting and people see why congregations are interesting but conferences and conventions, theres a lot of, who is representing, and to explain why, not only that is meaningful, which was meaningful to them but also interesting and i do think its one of the magical moments of the book to see you take this thing that we would all feel the impulse to be how do i get to the good stuff and say this actually is the good stuff if we see it right, or this networking and connection, and also, though, as you say, for the way it ties back to your question about gender, about the ways that these spaces become not exclusively but spaces of the male ministerial privilege. I wonder if you could just tell people who havent yet read it what you draw from, what you learn from those areas and why you think those faces matter. What youve got space, drew you to it . Did you know all along that was going to be a real telling part or did it develop over the course of your study . Nicole thank you so much. Its funny because i do remember people cautioning me about a couple things, one being there would not an lot of information about churches and the records were not deep and conventions would be really boring and theres not a lot in them but i would say i was encouraged by evelyn when she actually reduced the schedule of the convention. And i was like wow, that was really instructive about something i had no real insight into after having read the book so i knew there was something you could do with those minutes beyond be bored by them. The baptist know, Convention Minutes are a treasure trove of information about black religious and political life preserved on microfilm. Some of them have 30year runs of their Convention Minutes over the Virginia Baptist State Convention, every year you can find an annual convention record. Its robust. I only looked at one segment of the state. These exist for every state almost. Its a huge archive, if you think about it, of black and as i got into them, there was a lot here to see and it also came out of an investment in using the archive of black peoples lives. So in recognition the archives of black religious life in many instances can be small, can be mediated often through the eyes of white people, that this is an archive that comes from black people about his experience and so it was really important for me to venture those sources and to use every bit, like i remember in graduate school, one of my instructors talking about being told, when you find something about black peoples lives you have to figure out how you can use it and use it in the most robust way possible. So it was really important for me to read those sources and get everything i could from them. You cant help but be struck by what is included in them. The names of all of these delegates who attended, the names and locations of all the churches that are there. I mean, you know, the different issues that theyre discussing and reporting in their minutes. Their financial records. Theyre rich, incredibly rich. I saw so much more in them and it was so important to use. And then as im reading through them, im noticing there are no women sort of initially on the boards of these conventions but they show up, they show up in these accounts where theyre acknowledged for their donations for these conventions, the donation of a golden coin. Then you see it happen again. And then you see it happen again. Huh . Whats going on here that women are showing up in this very particular way. To me it speaks to how women become central financial figures is one of the first way we see them in the convention is as donors, people who are financially demonstrating the sacrificial giving that, you know, so many of these conventions rely on. So you know, it was one of these narratives that is already running in my head about the role of black women and churches of financial people and seeing it be constructed in rely time in the conventions as people are being recognized for their giving. And of course it raises the question about how a b