MAPH student Amber Harrison Places at Competition

Amber Harrison won third place for her poster on "Juneteenth: America's Forgotten Independence Day," at the 2018 Graduate and Postdoctoral Research Symposium, which was held on March 6.

Congratulations, Amber!

You can learn more about her project from her abstract:

"Juneteenth, the topic in question, refers to the specific date and location June 19, 1865 and Galveston, Texas. It was this particular day and place that the last remaining slaves in the United States were finally set free. Despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln had already announced the Emancipation Proclamation several years before in the midst of the American Civil War, as well as the Thirteenth Amendment officially being instated on January 31, 1865, it still took more time to make the decree officially enforced. This subject matter is especially of interest because Juneteenth is an event and holiday that many people are not aware of, let alone the importance and celebrations of it. For many African Americans, they consider Juneteenth to be their own or actual "independence day" since they were still enslaved when America fought and won its independence from the British in the late eighteenth century. Though it had a rough beginning in Texas, Juneteenth was made a recognized state holiday in the 1980s, but still has not been made an official national holiday in the United States. This unacknowledged "holiday" might be the possible victim of America's forgetting of the key aspects of its Civil War in order to let (re)union and reconciliation take over. Juneteenth, along with the institution of slavery as a whole, was swept up into the deep recesses of America's memory."