The eleventh annual conference was held at Gregynog Hall, the University of Wales’s residential education centre near Newtown, Powys, from Friday 8th October to Sunday 10th October, 2004.

Gregynog, a large country house standing in splendid and extensive wooded parkland, is about 150 years old, although parts of an older house have been incorporated. The estate was bought in 1920 by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, sisters of the coal baron Lord Davies of Llandinam, as a centre for music, art, and printing (the Gregynog Press), and in 1960 the surviving sister made a gift of the estate to the university.

The conference was attended by about fifty members and guests.

Programme

Friday

1. Evening lecture:
Chair: Vivien Miller (Middlesex University)
Leon Litwack (University of California, Berkeley):
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow

Saturday

2: Antebellum Politics
Chair: Joel Silbey (Cornell University and Oxford)
Owen Robert Butler (University of Nottingham):
As Union men, as Whigs, and as Southern men: The importance to Southern Whigs of Unionism, Sectionalism and Nativism in the 1852 Presidential Nomination and Campaign
Graham A. Peck (Saint Xavier University):
Stephen A. Douglas and the Northern Democratic Origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act

3: Southern Ways
Chair: Constance Schultz (University of South Carolina)
Rebecca Griffin (Warwick University):
‘ Gettin’ out to Play and Courtin’ all Dey Pleased’:
The Temporal and Spatial Geographies of Enslaved Courtship in Antebellum North Carolina
James Campbell (University of Nottingham):
The Murder of Dudley Hoyt and the Curious Fate of Samuel Pendleton: Honour and Law in the Antebellum South
Beth Barton Schweiger (University of Cambridge):
Of Course I Read of Sundays: Reading, Writing, and Aspiration in the Upper South, 1840-1860

4: Progressive Reform
Chair: Elizabeth Clapp (University of Leicester)
Axel R. Schäfer (Keele University):
Isaac M. Rubinow, the Campaign for Public Health Insurance, and the Transatlantic Dimension of Progressive Reform, 1890-1920
Oliver Brown (New College, Oxford):
Robert Woods and Conceptions of Social Justice during the Progressive Period

5. Peter Parish Memorial Lecture:
Chair: Richard Carwardine (University of Oxford)
William W. Freehling (Virginia Foundation of the Humanities, Charlottesville,
and University of Kentucky):
Conspiracy, Coincidence, and the Immediate Causes of the Civil War

Sunday

6: The Coming of the Civil War
Chair: Richard Blackett (Vanderbilt University)
Workshop discussion debating William Freehling’s lecture:
How Should Historians Handle the Accidental and the Contingent?