African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) Meeting

This year I was honored to have a paper accepted by the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) for their annual meeting, held in Pittsburgh on March 27-28, 2026. Some of you may remember that I attended the conference as a spectator last year to learn as much as I could about the field and I noted that there was space for genealogy in the academic world. Confident that genealogists had something to bring to this conference, I submitted a paper proposal, and it was accepted to a session discussing microhistories. The conference was just as invigorating as it was last year, with many wonderful scholars sharing ideas and their work in a variety of fields. Again, there was a notable trend of genealogy in the work of many of the sessions I attended.

Like last year, I managed to grab a few books that utilized genealogical research methods, though I was sad that since I was flying this time, I could not take advantage of as many of the books as last year. The first that caught my eye was entitled Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History by Lori D. Ginzberg. This work chronicles the life of Richard Walpole Cogdell, a bank clerk from Charleston, South Carolina, who purchased fifteen-year-old Sarah Martha Sanders in 1830. Sarah would go on to have nine of Richard’s children. After her death in 1857, Richard and the children moved to Philadelphia, where the children became a part of the African American middle class. The other, by Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, is The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn. This is a biography of Julia Chinn, the mixed-race wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, the U.S. Vice President under Martin Van Buren.

Perhaps the highlight of conference for me was the keynote address the first night. Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black discussed her research for her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2025. The book focuses on Harriet Tubman’s service in the American Civil War, particularly her role in the Combahee River Raid. This was a Union military operation which freed 756 enslaved people from rice plantations in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Dr. Fields-Black told the audience she was most interested in discovering what the experience was like for the enslaved people involved, but that military records of the raid only include the accounts of the Union Army. Her primary source to uncover the stories of the enslaved are very familiar to genealogists – U.S. Civil War Pension Files.  

It was thrilling to hear an academic scholar discuss her genealogical research methods for this project to a group of other academics. She described the depositions in the pension files which included details about familial connections, plantations where they worked, who previously enslaved them – pieces that could be used to map out family trees and connect enslaved people to the people that enslaved them, ultimately leading to even more records. She mentioned that genealogists often refer to the “1870 Brick Wall” when researching African American families and that the information in the pension files is helping to overcome that barrier. In her discussion of her research methods for locating individuals involved in the raid, Dr. Fields-Black was describing her process – essentially the FAN method (Friends, Associates, Neighbors) – that genealogists utilize in our everyday work. In the book, Dr. Fields-Black uses a variety of other sources familiar to genealogists including planter’s records (probate, land, account, etc.) as well as vital records and compensation claims to the Confederate government to reconstruct the lives of the freedom seekers.

The keynote address was not the only place I found genealogy at the conference. Many of the sessions I attended involved a family history element focused on generational connections. One session entitled “Perspectives on Archives and Counter-Archives,” brought to light the silences in archives that historically excluded Black records and the struggles of researchers unable to locate their people in the records. All three presenters in the session discussed how their own family history led them to their topics – one noting that her exploration of how ancestors also actively refused to be included in archives which were built by colonial systems of oppression and instead chose their own methods for carrying forth family and community knowledge. Another noted that she would not have come across her topic of northern Black women abolitionists where it not for records kept in her own family archive. This idea of generational knowledge and family record keeping outside of an archive or institution is a genealogical form of preserving the past and one’s ancestors.

Other sessions focused on the importance of oral history in filling in the gaps that the archive neglects. One project focused on conducting oral histories with Black Vietnam War veterans and their family members, driven by the experiences on the researcher’s own grandfather’s service and its effect on her family. Another theme in several sessions was matrilineal preservation of knowledge, passed from mother to daughter across generations, for everything from how to maintain and care for one’s hair and dress to maintaining cultural traditions and family stories. Genealogical themes and research methods are an ever-growing trend in this space, and academics are certainly no longer shying away from making their research topics personal.