Herald of Freedom

Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. His work on early African American politics and print culture appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, and edited collections on early African American print culture, American literature, and the Colored Conventions movement. Spires’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Mellon/Mays Initiatives.

Nikki M. Taylor is Professor of History and Chair of the Department at Howard University. She specializes in 19th century African American History. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and Duke University (MA, PhD, Certificate in Women's Studies), Dr. Taylor has won several fellowships including Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson. Taylor’s second book, America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark (2013), is a political and intellectual biography of one of the foremost African American activists, intellectuals, orators, and politicians in the nineteenth-century--a man whose name once was spoken in the same breath as Frederick Douglass, Dr. McCune Smith, and John Mercer Langston. This book charts Clark’s journey from recommending that slaveholders be sent to "hospitable/ graves," to advocating for a separate black nation, to forging alliances with German socialists and labor radicals, to adopting the conservative mantle of the Democratic Party. Dr. Taylor is currently completing her 4th monograph, 'Brooding Over Bloody Revenge:' Enslaved Women, 'Wild Justice' and Lethal Resistance to Slavery. The manuscript examines enslaved women who used lethal violence to resist slavery from the colonial to antebellum eras, challenging all previous interpretations about the nature of their resistance. Taylor was elected to AAS membership in 2022.

Vincent Golden is the curator of newspapers and periodicals at AAS. He provides reference service to the collection as well as builds and improves access to it. Vince also works with the other curators towards collection development and coordination of multi-collection projects. He was formerly the special collections/reference librarian at the Paul V. Galvin Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and worked in the office of Special Collections Administration for several years at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his MSLIS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Eclair Morton is a graduate fellow in paper conservation and a dual MA/MS candidate at the Garman Art Conservation Department, State University of New York, Buffalo State. She was the summer 2022 conservation intern at the American Antiquarian Society, where she worked on the Herald of Freedom, 18th-century broadsides, and Civil War era manuscripts. Eclair previously held internships at the Museum of Modern Art, and in private practice in New York. She received her BS from the City University of New York Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies Program, with a focus on organic chemistry and art history. Eclair’s studies are supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Garman Family Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by scholarships from the Linton Vincent, and Buffalo State College tuition funds.