On January sixth, Dr. Thavolia Glymph grew to become the a hundred and fortieth president of the American Historic Affiliation. She is the primary Black girl to carry this honor. Dr. Gyymph is the Peabody Household Distinguished Professor of Historical past and professor of regulation at Duke College. She is the previous president of the Southern Historic Affiliation.
Professor Glymph joined the college at Duke College in 2000. She is a graduate of Hampton College in Virginia and holds a grasp’s diploma and a Ph.D. from Purdue College in West Lafayette, Indiana.
She takes workplace amid the Affiliation’s urgency to broaden the definitions of historic scholarship, advocating for the educating of trustworthy historical past within the Ok–12 classroom, and extra.
Thavolia’s curiosity in historical past is deeply rooted. As she grew up within the South, “historical past was unavoidable.” She discovered a love for the topic early, spurred on by her dad and mom, maternal grandparents, a neighborhood that valued training and public life, and frequent journeys to her native public library. At house and within the public library, she “grew to become a scholar of historical past,” studying histories of the US and African People, however extra usually these of Europe, which have been merely extra considerable within the library.
Extra importantly, it’s additionally the place she took lessons taught by Alice Davis. Thavolia remembers Davis as a no-nonsense teacher not a lot older than herself, just lately discharged from the navy, who launched her to the fun of analysis and the work of historian Harold D. Woodman.
It was in Davis’s class, Thavolia says, that she first realized what sort of analysis she wished to do and probably making a profession as a historical past instructor.
Attending Hampton College, a traditionally Black faculty based in 1868, was “clarifying” for Thavolia. It was her first encounter with unique historic analysis, archival collections, and the true breadth and depth of historiography.
Thavolia brings that financial lens to the historical past of the Nineteenth-century United States, significantly the fields of Southern historical past, labor historical past, and girls’s historical past.
Glymph is the creator of Out of the Home of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Family (Cambridge College, Press, 2008) and The Ladies’s Combat: The Civil Conflict’s Battles for Dwelling, Freedom, and Nation (College of North Carolina Press, 2020). This newest guide explores the position of girls through the Civil Conflict.
It reveals the difficult battles that girls — Black and White, enslaved and free — took on to outline the that means of freedom, house, and nation within the North and South.
Above all else, Thavolia insists that there was no gentle bulb second that made her who she is at the moment, and being serious about historical past as a baby doesn’t lead one inevitably to the professoriate. It was and stays “an unbelievable journey,” not a direct path.
As president of the AHA, Dr. Glymph says she’s going to work to “help the numerous necessary current initiatives and encourage future efforts that goal to make sure that the work of historians is seen and heard not solely by different students however by the bigger communities we serve and people we nonetheless must serve who’re ready for us to see them.”
