Podcast
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The book examined ads placed by formerly enslaved people searching for lost family members after the Civil War, using ten chapters to read and contextualize those advertisements and discuss their broader historical significance.
When slavery ended in 1865, newly freed black Americans began to search for their lost family members. In her new book, Last Scene, historian Judith Giesberg tells some of the stories of people who pl...
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The book examined ads placed by formerly enslaved people searching for lost family members after the Civil War, using ten chapters to read and contextualize those advertisements and discuss their broader historical significance.
When slavery ended in 1865, newly freed black Americans began to search for their lost family members. In her new book, Last Scene, historian Judith Giesberg tells some of the stories of people who placed those ads.
Geiesberg says that when she's given public lectures about this online archive of ads, the audience always asks the question, did they find each other? Geiesberg's new book, called Last Scene, is her more detailed response to the question.
In each of the ten chapters here, she closely reads ads placed in search of lost children, mothers, wives, siblings, and even comrades who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.
Geiesberg tells us the cruel reality was that the success rate of these advertisements may have been as low as 2%, offering readers a portal into the lived experience of slavery rather than happy reunion stories.
Throughout Last Scene, Geiesberg steps back from these individual ads to give readers the larger historical context that made them necessary, reminding that no federal agency existed to help freed people locate loved ones after the Civil War.