Prof. Nemata Blyden, "The Erskine Family of Tennessee and Liberia: Tracing a Global Black Family History"

"Long before…American and European historians were interrogating the archives, as African historians, we were doing that. And we were using oral history and oral tradition. I think it's come in handy for me now, for a project like this."

We’re joined in this episode by Nemata Blyden (Armstead Professor of Nineteenth-Century African American History, University of Virginia).

Blyden’s research project in development is interested in telling the history of various places in the Atlantic world through the eyes of an extended family - the Erskine family, Blyden’s own - from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.

“That will be one of the things, I think, that will motivate me to finish this. Because so many people can’t tell these stories…The fact that we [the Erskine family] can trace our ancestors back to the 18th century is a big deal for Black people in the African diaspora. That I can pinpoint somebody in the 1790s - in a record, as a Black person - is huge."

Referenced in Discussion

[03:40] Dr Blyden’s book publications:

West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: The Diaspora in Reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000)

African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019)

[17:44] ‘When I first started studying Liberia in graduate school, there was a volume by Bell Wiley… letters from formerly enslaved people who ended up in Liberia, writing back to the people who had owned them, and to relatives’:

Wiley Bell I. eds., ‘Slaves no more: Letters from Liberia 1833-1869’ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980)

[30:37] Blyden mentions ‘The great British historian Christopher Fyfe.’

Fyfe’s seminal work ‘A History of Sierra Leone’ (1962) studies the Creole (Krio) community and is credited with sparking ‘a cultural revival’ in Sierra Leone. (Obituary, The Guardian, 2008)

Co-hosts:

Shea Hendry — History PhD Candidate, Hughes Hall

Shea’s research examines the children of Loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood—concurrently and consecutively—throughout the Early National period.

Megan Renoir — History PhD Candidate, Homerton College

Megan’s research examines the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. Her work expands our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.

Production by Daisy Semmler — History PhD Candidate, Jesus College; MPhil, Fitzwilliam College, 2025