Rituals of Remembrance - An Engrossing Narrative by Historian Blair Kelley

The first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative from an award-winning historian.

For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

Blair will be joined in conversation with Mary Niall Mitchell.

Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is also the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kelley is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (2010) which was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize and Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), which received the 2024 Brooklyn Library Book Award, the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History.

Mary Niall Mitchell is Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair in New Orleans Studies, Gordon Mueller Professor of Public History, and Director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies. She is the author of Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (NYU Press, 2008) and has published online for Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Southern Cultures, and Commonplace. Mitchell is one of five lead historians for Freedomonthemove.org, a collaborative crowdsourced database of fugitive slave advertisements housed at Cornell University. She co-curated the exhibit Don't Stand Alone: Black Labor Organizing in New Orleans (2024) and curated Amongst Ourselves: Resisting Slavery at Whitney Plantation (2026). At the Midlo Center she and her staff work with community partners throughout the city. She also a collaborates with The Humanities Action Lab at Hunter College-CUNY.