On August 17, 2023, historian Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson discussed his book on the Atlantic slave trade and how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. In Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, Dr. Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean.

On August 3, 2023, Mills Kelly gave a lecture about his book, Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail. For over two decades, hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia walked through some of the most beautiful landscapes of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Then, in 1952, the Appalachian Trail Conference moved 300 miles of the trail more than 50 miles to the west. This change was the single largest rerouting of the AT in its long history.