Prof. Kimberly Welch, 'Eulalie Mandeville’s Money: A Free Black Woman and Her Legacy in Antebellum New Orleans'

In this episode, we’re joined by Kimberly Welch , Associate Professor of History and Law at Vanderbilt University. Kim is currently a Fellow-in-Residence at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She spoke with us about the paper she presented in the seminar, titled “Eulalie Mandeville’s Money: A Free Black Woman and Her Legacy in Antebellum New Orleans.” It’s part of her current book project, which follows the intertwined lives of two free people of color — Eulalie Mandeville and Bernard Soulié — across New Orleans, Santiago de Cuba, and Paris. Her work examines how discriminatory laws around marriage and inheritance shaped the transmission of wealth across generations for Black Americans. To get a better sense of the world Kim brings to life in her forthcoming book, Megan and I revisited her 2022 article: "The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans." The Journal of the Civil War Era 12, no. 4 (2022): 473-502. . Co-hosted by: Megan Renoir , a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge whose work focuses on Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict. See Megan’s recent publication here: “Recognition as Resilience: How an Unrecognized Indigenous Nation is Using Visibility as a Pathway Toward Restorative Justice”, The American Historical Review , Daisy Semmler (MPhil, 2025) examines the anti-literacy era in the United States (c. 1740–1865). Her work (re)constructs how enslaved and free African-descended people developed literacy through adaptive, informal, and mostly clandestine pedagogical practices.

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Prof. Kimberly Welch, 'Eulalie Mandeville’s Money: A Free Black Woman and Her Legacy in Antebellum New Orleans' is an episode from Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast by Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast.

This episode is 00:42:59 long.

This episode was published on May 25, 2025.

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