Nov
17
11:30pm
Women You Should Know: An Evening with Pulitzer Prize Winner Marcia Chatelain & Kimberly Hamlin
By The Mercantile Library
Join historians Marcia Chatelain and Kimberly Hamlin in conversation as they discuss some Women You Should Know andChatelain’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.
Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University and is also the author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration.
Hamlin, our 2020 Annual Meeting lecturer, is the author of From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age AmericaandFree Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener.
This program is part of our Allgood-McLean: Women You Should Know series, co-founded by Hamlin. This hybrid program is free and open to the public.
Copies of Franchise will be available for sale and signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.
About Franchise:
Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald’s have long symbolized capitalism’s villainous effects on our nation’s most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place?
In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who—in the troubled years after King’s assassination—believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality. With the discourse of social welfare all but evaporated, federal programs under presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted a new vision for racial justice: that the franchising of fast food restaurants, by black citizens in their own neighborhoods, could finally improve the quality of black life. Synthesizing years of research, Franchise tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to wither.
Marcia Chatelain is a scholar, speaker, and strategist based in Washington, D.C. She teaches courses in African American life and culture at Georgetown University. When not in the classroom, she’s on the road, talking to audiences about our nation’s pressing and pervasive social issues, including racism, universities and the history of slavery, as well as activist movements. She is a frequent guest and contributor on podcasts, television news and radio programs.
Kimberly A. Hamlin is an award-winning historian, author, and professor specializing in the history of women, gender, and sex in the United States. Hamlin contributes to the Washington Post’s “Made by History” column and other media, and she regularly speaks to audiences across the country about women’s and gender history. She is a member of the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer Bureau and the Ohio Humanities Council Speaker’s Bureau. Her research on women, gender, science, and politics has been featured in various media outlets including NPR and CBC radio, Vice, and qz.com. She is a Professor of History and Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
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