Among my goals for this blog is not merely to introduce the world to the tragically underappreciated Daisy Lampkin, but also to demystify for lay readers and novice historians what historical research looks like and how judgments and reasonable historical interpretations are made. In this post I give some indication how new research discoveries can combine with that we already know (i.e., the “historiography”), to produce new interpretations. What follows is somewhat speculative, but that is the nature of historical hypotheses. Further research will either confirm my propositions or falsify them.

​Very much belatedly, in 2021, the federal government finally recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday, a day in which all Americans should take pride. On June 19, 1865, at Galveston, Texas, some of the last enslaved persons still held in bondage were informed of their freedom.* Juneteenth thus symbolizes the final eradication of chattel slavery in this country, an outcome for which not only hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers and their commander in chief died, but a day for which many thousands of Americans, including many themselves enslaved and those in the abolitionist movement, had worked and struggled, at considerable personal cost.

​Daisy Lampkin was born in 1883 or 1884, nearly twenty years after the 13th Amendment (mostly) outlawed slavery in the US. But her life intersected with the history of the anti-slavery movement in a number of ways, making her an heir to Juneteenth and an important point of connection between nineteenth century abolitionism and twentieth century suffrage and civil rights activism.

A few weeks ago I made a post on the various literatures, sub-fields, and specialties that informed my book, American Power in the Netherlands. I suspect many non-historians don’t fully understand the extent of other scholarship upon which historians rely to tell their stories, the cumulative and accretional building that goes into any work of legitimate history.

The context—what practitioners call “historiography”—for my Lampkin biography is no less extensive. Our lives touch so many other lives in so many ways, and this richness produces endless lines of investigation by scholars endeavoring to capture these connections. This is why we have regional and local histories, political histories, cultural histories, social and sociological histories, gender histories, diplomatic and military histories, intellectual and ideological histories, material and technological histories, and so much more.

It is incredibly stimulating to engage with all these stories in the context of the Lampkin project. I had done the obligatory reading on the civil rights movement, suffrage, Jim Crow, and other topics back in graduate school. But there is a wealth of new material out there that informs the project. Much of it is academic history, but it’s also been inspiring to discover the breadth and quality of popular, non-academic history relevant to Daisy’s story.

​Here is just a sampling of what I am currently reading, have recently read, or am shortly planning to read to give substance to the Lampkin narrative:

With each new discovery, my Daisy Lampkin biography gives me some new cause to celebrate my hometown of Pittsburgh. Now, for the next few days, the whole nation can join in on the love: the National Football League is holding its annual draft this year in the Steel City. I’m not quite the (American) football fan I was growing up in the 1970s, when all the boys on the playground idolized Franco Harris and Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann. As Pittsburgh becomes the center of the professional football universe for a few days, there is, I have come to learn, a connection—thin, perhaps, but nevertheless there—between Daisy Lampkin and the Steelers and Pittsburgh and the NFL’s annual player draft.

I've been running a series over on Bluesky, a photo album of the people in Daisy Lampkin's life. The breadth of her social connections, her activist allies, and her political networks is breathtaking. The following give some sense of that scope, and how she (and others) overlapped their community and national networks, enriching both. Follow along for more on my Daisy Lampkin biography project.

​In the early days of a project, all is new, all directions possible, no conclusions are fixed. It’s an exciting time of discovery, to formulate hypothesis, test them against the evidence, change course as needed, and see where the research takes you.
 
When I started the project on Daisy Lampkin I knew that I would be learning new things about race and gender and class in America, about how the suffrage movement influenced the civil rights movement, and about how African American women such as Daisy made their entrée into such networks. I also expected to learn, and am learning, a great deal about how local communities, including cultural and political powerbases, related to larger patterns of national influence. What I didn’t realize at the beginning was the role that technology would be playing in the narrative: