Coy James Memorial Lecture Series in American History

Each year the Albion College History Department invites a distinguished scholar in U.S. history to share their work with the faculty, students and community at-large. This endowed lecture series was established to honor the late Prof. Coy James, a much-revered member of the History faculty for many years. Some recent speakers have included:

2007-08

Kevin K. Gaines (University of Michigan) spoke on American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates in the Civil Rights Era.  Gaines is director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is author of the award-winning Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture during the Twentieth Century.


2006-07

Thomas J. Sugrue (University of Pennsylvania) presented his research on
“Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Detroit and America’s Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality.” Prof. Sugrue is the author of prize-winning The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press).

2005-06

Mae Ngai (University of Chicago) shared her work on "’An Ironic Testimony to the Value of American Democracy’: Assimilationism and the World War II Internment of Japanese Americans.” Prof. Ngai is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, 1924-1965 (Princeton University Press). Impossible Subjects has received multiple honors including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from Organization of American Historians and the Littleton Griswold Prize from American Historical Association.

2004-05

Nick Savatore (Cornell University) presented “Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin’s Ministry from Mississippi to Detroit, 1915-1984, the focus of his most recent book.