May Virtual Lunch and Learn – “Writing the Biography of Frederick Douglass and the Bailey/Douglass Family: Scenes from the Archives”

This talk will survey selected sources for the writing of a comprehensive, historical biography of Frederick Douglass and the Bailey/Douglass family. It will proceed scenically in the manner of an illustrated historical panorama, matching documentary evidence (chosen mostly from Maryland archives) to central events in the history of one of our country’s most remarkable families from the 1660s to the fall of Richmond in 1865.

Ezra Greenspan, Edmund and Louise Kahn Chair in the Humanities, Emeritus at Southern Methodist University, is a literary, cultural, and media historian who has written biographies of Walt Whitman, G. P. Putnam, and William Wells Brown. He is currently writing a comprehensive biography of Frederick (Bailey) Douglass and his generic family, whose coverage will run from 1634 into the twentieth century.