Karol Kucinski, Co-Chair NAHOF Hall and Museum Committee, will introduce the four writers and their books which are at various stages of publication and which have connections to Peterboro and to the quest for freedom.

 In October of 2013, the Madison County Historian’s Office started a project to record the stories of Veterans from Madison County. The project is ongoing and to date over 20 veterans stories have been recorded. In the fall of 2018, the historian’s office launched “History Where you Eat.”  The event features a brief history and tour of local historic restaurants. Close to 20 events have been offered since the program started and they have drawn over 1000 people to local restaurants. During the COVID pandemic Urtz conducted nearly 100 interviews with business owners, public officials, teachers, school superintendents, not for profit organizations and how the pandemic impacted them. In April of 2022, Urtz received the Emily Marshall Champion of Tourism by Madison County Tourism. 

In addition to cycling across the US, he has ridden down the Appalachians and across Montana, South Dakota, France and Spain. His earlier books, also from Pegasus, were A Hole in the Wind: A Climate Scientist’s Bicycle Journeys Across the US and A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean: A Bicycle Journey Through the Northern Dominion of Oil. While following Harriet Tubman’s route from Maryland to Ontario, of course, Peterboro was one the sites he studied. 

Olsavsky reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas animated by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals, formerly enslaved runaways—who grasped the economy of slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and communicated strategies of resistance to abolitionists—serve as the book’s central focus. 

Jesse Olsavsky is an Assistant Professor of History at Duke Kunshan University, China. He is an historian who looks at slavery, abolition, and their long legacies. He is currently working on a book titled In the Tradition: The Abolitionist Tradition and Human Emancipation, which looks at how twentieth century movements, in both the US and numerous parts of the world studied, wrote about, and re-invoked the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement during their own struggles for self-determination. 

Cris Amann, Co-Chair of the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum (NAHOF) Ongoing Abolition Committee and the Madison County Antiracism Collaborative,  a 2018 founder and a leader of the Hamilton Anti-Racism Coalition, and the lead for Madison County LGBTQIA Network hosted by BRiDGES will introduce three Power of the Pen campaigns that help continue the quest for freedom.

 Gerrit Smith invited the abolitionists to come to Peterboro and he himself became an active abolitionist because of the convention in Peterboro. Subsequently he became one of America’s most prominent abolitionists and reformers. Smith’s four inductee companions were house guests of Ann and Gerrit Smith in their Peterboro home – with Douglass and Tubman several times. Our intent for Juneteenth 2023 is to hold a “class reunion” of the 2005 inductees. We imagine that Gerrit Smith invites the other inducted abolitionists to come back to Peterboro sometime after the Civil War. The inductees hosted by Smith, interact with one another, call to mind the struggle for freedom, and reflect on the challenges ahead. These veterans of the abolitionist crusade had many interpersonal connections. They were, to borrow a phrase from the historian Lawrence Friedman, “gregarious saints.” 

- Milton C. Sernett PhD will be the moderator of the panel. Sernett, professor emeritus Syracuse University in African American Studies and author of many publications including North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American will also be the voice of Frederick Douglass. 

- John Bowen M.D., a member of the NAHOF Cabinet of Freedom and a member of the NAHOF Induction Committee, will be the voice of William Lloyd Garrison. 

- Carol Faulkner PhD is Professor of History at Syracuse University, former member of the NAHOF Cabinet of Freedom, and author of Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Faulkner will be the voice of Mott. 

- Norman K. Dann PhD, professor emeritus Morrisville State College, founder and former member of the Cabinet, and author of Practical Dreamer: Gerrit Smith and the Crusade for Social Reform will be the voice of Smith. 

- Kate Clifford Larson PhD, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman Portrait of an American Hero, advisor for the movie Harriet, and consultant for the National Park Service Tubman sites in Cambridge MD and Auburn NY will be the voice of Tubman.

The panel of 2005 Abolition Inductees to the Hall of Fame will be followed by Recognizing Abraham Lincoln with a wall mount to accompany his Dorothy Reister statue, a loan from Stone Quarry Hill Art Park. Though personally opposed to slavery, Lincoln was not an abolitionist. A political pragmatist, Lincoln’s public stance on slavery evolved over the years. He wrote and signed the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, and pushed for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution that banned slavery.

Kate Clifford Larson PhD is an author of critically acclaimed biographies including Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, and Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter. With two degrees from Simmons University, an MBA from Northeastern, and a doctorate in American History from the University of New Hampshire, Dr. Larson is an award-winning historical consultant who has worked on feature film scripts, documentaries, museum exhibits, curriculum guides, public history initiatives, heritage tourism products, and numerous publications. She is a primary consultant for the National Park Service Harriet Tubman sites in Auburn NY and Cambridge MD.

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone shows evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s education system with an in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks and other higher education course materials. Sifting through a wealth of materials, from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which white supremacist ideology has infiltrated American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity. Yacovone lays out the arc of America’s white supremacy from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. The author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks, that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. The publication is a major assessment of how we got where we are today and of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning - from literature and science to medicine and law - and why this kind of thinking has endured for more than two centuries. 

Ty Seidule, retired U.S. Brigadier General and author of General Robert E. Lee and Me,  will present Our Right to Serve: The Black Cadets Who Challenged a President, Changed West Point, and Inspired an Army. Seidule is currently at Hamilton College in Clinton NY as the inaugural Joshua Chamberlain Fellow. He was former head of the history department and the first professor emeritus of history at West Point. Growing up in Alexandria VA, attending Robert E. Lee Elementary School, and graduating from Washington and Lee University and ROTC, Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life at first reinforced the Lost Cause myth. Seidule joined the United States Army in 1984 as an officer. He served in the military for 36 years during which time he received his Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Ohio State University. 

In General Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, Seidule seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War have remained buried beneath layers of myth, challenges the deeply-held legends of the Confederacy, explores why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed, and provides an interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting. In his article Black Power Cadets: How African American Students Defeated President Nixon’s Confederate Monument and Changed West Point 1971-76, (The Hudson River Valley Review: A Journal of Regional Studies, Autumn 2019, Marist College, pp.54 – 82.) Seidule explains how the Class of 1972 black cadets at the United States Military Academy worked within the institution to lead toward increased racial understanding, and prevented a Confederate monument on the campus.