American Democracy Lecture

Dr. Judith Giesberg holds the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities and is Professor of History at Villanova University.

The author of several books, Dr. Giesberg’s latest title, Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families,  was published by Simon and Schuster, on February 4, 2025. Giesberg directs a digital project, Last Seen:  Finding Family After Slavery, that collects, digitizes, and transcribes advertisements used by formerly enslaved people looking for family members.

 In the aftermath of the Civil War, four-million Americans began searching for family members, separated by slavery. They looked for one another in US military and refugee camps, in the South’s occupied towns, and the plantations where they had once been enslaved. They placed advertisements in Black newspapers telling their stories and waited for responses.

Dr. Geisberg will read excerpts from her book that detail the thoughts and emotions of the Freedom Generation as they search for their mothers, children, husbands, and wives, and express in their own words what sustained them during years of searching.