Lamar University is pleased to offer a lecture by Dr. Jeff Forret, Professor of History. Dr. Forret discusses his new book, Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In this book, Professor Forret examines the legal history of the slave trade, discussing the historical relationships between the criminal justice system and the slave trade.
Dr. Forret is a Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow and 2016 recipient of the University Scholar Award. Professor Forret's Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (LSU Press, 2015) won the 18th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Dr. Forret's other publications include Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (LSU Press, 2006); Slavery in the United States (Facts on File, 2012), New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison, co-edited with Christine E. Sears (LSU Press, 2015) and numerous journal articles.
