The History and Legacy of Black Entrepreneurship in the United States initiative has aimed to provide the Keller Center community an opportunity to learn from the country’s most prominent academic scholars.

Presentation

“The Angels Are in the Details”: Reconstructing an African American Inventor’s Life from Circumstantial Evidence.”

This talk will discuss the life of early twentieth-century aviator, automotive and aeronautical engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur Lucean Arthur Headen, and will examine the strategies Headen adopted to finance and market his inventions over a forty-year career in the United States and England.

Equally, it will describe the “micro-macro” methodology used to uncover Headen’s mostly undocumented story and will discuss the unexpected insights into biography, technology, and entrepreneurship this methodology yielded.

About the Speaker

Jill D. Snider is an independent scholar who lives in Washington, DC. She holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has been a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, the National Air & Space Museum, the American Historical Association, and the National Aeronautics & Space Administration.

Dr. Snider’s work focuses on technology, invention, and entrepreneurship within African American communities. A book chapter based on her dissertation (which examined competing visions of aviation among African Americans in the 1910s and 1920s) probed how the use of airplanes by white police and rioters in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 affected the development of those visions. Dr. Snider is more recently author of the biography, Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2020).

In her career, Dr. Snider has combined historical research and writing with work as as an academic archivist, a technical writer for environmental and research firms, a program analyst for the U.S. Census Bureau, and a business analyst for government IT teams.

Now semi-retired, she continues to conduct research, writing, and archival projects for private clients and is at work on a book that examines how African Americans, enslaved and free, participated in and perceived ballooning technology during the antebellum and Civil War periods.

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