Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor — Race, History, and the American Self-Image
Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor on the long history of racial violence and selective memory in America — and what honest reckoning requires of both institutions and individuals.
Why we picked this
Pryor's work sits at the intersection of personal memoir and rigorous historiography — she's written about her own experience with the n-word as a classroom flashpoint, which gives her scholarship a quality of first-person stakes most historians don't bring to the podium.
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a historian of race in America whose work combines archival research with memoir-like candor. Her book Colored Travelers traced how Black Americans navigated a white republic that simultaneously claimed to welcome them and systematically excluded them; more recently she has written about the use of racial slurs in educational settings, drawing on her experience as a professor who had to decide, in real time, how to handle one of the most charged words in the American lexicon appearing in a classroom text.
At City Arts & Lectures, Pryor speaks to something broader: how a nation tells stories about its past in ways that protect its present self-image, and what breaks that protection open. The conversation comes at a moment of intense political contest over what American history curricula should include — which makes her blend of careful scholarship and personal witness particularly timely.
Pryor teaches at Williams College and has been a visiting fellow at Yale; she brings the rigor of academic history into contact with the more urgent questions about what history is actually for.