Media & Events

Health & Heritage: Women and Medicine in History - March 1 & 2, 2025 Washington's Crossing, PA

Ideologies of Mass Incarceration - Zinner Forum

Talk & Document Workshop, New Iberia, Louisiana

Iberia African American Historical Society - Telling more honest histories and recovering Black voices of Louisiana with Dr. Phebe Hayes - June 2023

Racism and Roads: Cities hope Biden infrastructure funds will help reconnect Black neighborhoods by April Ryan December 17, 2021

Elected officials in Black communities are hoping federal money from the Biden administration and Democrats can be used to help undo the nation’s decades of segregation and neglect. [Cooper quoted.]

Historians Kidada Williams and Abigail Cooper discuss how African Americans built their own communities within Civil War refugee camps, as well as their relationship to African traditions and the Christianity of white missionaries. (original airdate: February 2021)

‘Their Great Soul-Hungering Desire Was Freedom’

African Americans living in Civil War refugee camps imagined a new future for themselves from the ashes of slavery.

Brandeis magazine, Summer 2020

Slavery and Its Legacies Podcast

Yale's Thomas Thurston spoke with Abigail Cooper, visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, about her work examining Civil War refugee camps across the South. Her talk traces the migrations and settlement patterns of black refugees while elucidating the cross-cultural encounters that took place in the camps. https://glc.yale.edu/SlaveryanditsLegacies/episodes/AbigailCooper

HISTORYnet Interview

Freed People’s Faith: An Interview with Historian Abigail Cooper

October 2020

Digging through official war records and narratives of former slaves recorded during the Works Progress Administration, Abigail Cooper, assistant professor of history at Brandeis University, has begun to uncover the powerful culture of faith and community-building forged by freed people in refugee camps during and after the Civil War.

National Park Service Interview

Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Dr. Abigail Cooper from Brandeis University about her research on the refugee camps that enslaved people moved into during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Lowcountry and beyond.