There are always antecedents to what we\u2019re seeing now if we look back into our history. — Manisha Sinha<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cNot only was the Confederacy founded on the idea of racial inequality, but monuments to it arose at moments in American history when southerners sought to defend white supremacy,\u201d the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair of American History wrote in August in the New York Daily News<\/em>.<\/p>\n In this case, that moment was after the Civil War and the fall of the Reconstruction, after Federal troops had vacated the defeated South, and \u201cdisenfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence reared up on a massive scale,\u201d she notes.<\/p>\n Sinha\u2019s historical work sharply parallels current politics, including the success of movements that placed Barack Obama in power, and the current resurgence of conservative ideals. Now, she brings her unique perspective to UConn as the new James L. and Shirley A. Draper Endowed Professor of History.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can really see how American democracy does not progress in one linear path,\u201d she says. \u201cIt moves in fits and starts, and you can lose things that you have won very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n The Slave’s Cause<\/strong><\/p>\n Born and educated at the undergraduate level in India, Sinha grew interested in the American civil rights movement because Martin Luther King Jr. espoused many of Gandhi\u2019s principles of nonviolent resistance. She came to the U.S. at age 21 to attend graduate school in history at Stony Brook University and Columbia University, where her dissertation on slaveholders and slaveholding was nominated for the competitive Bancroft Prize<\/a>. Much of her dissertation is referenced in her first book, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina\u00a0<\/em>(The University of North Carolina Press 1994). After that, she switched gears.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to write a book about people I actually liked,\u201d she laughs.<\/p>\n The Slave\u2019s Cause <\/em>focuses on the importance of organized slave resistance to the abolition movement. It has racked up a list of national awards, including, most notably, being long-listed for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and being a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University.<\/p>\n Her book traces some of the earliest anti-slavery organizations, such as slaves in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire who were petitioning for their freedom long before the Civil war \u2013 as early as the Revolutionary Era. Groups called the Anti-Slavery Committee and the Sons of Africa were crucial to the movement by creating their own program not only of abolition, but of desegregation and racial equality. These early black abolitionists influenced white abolitionist speakers and publishers like William Lloyd Garrison, who adopted their rhetoric and program.<\/p>\n \u201cThese groups were already imagining the interracial democracy we live in today,\u201d says Sinha.<\/p>\n![\"Manisha](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Sinha170913a05-UCToday1.jpg\")
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