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.https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2022.0065.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, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae467Daisy 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.