The annual meeting of the Society of Virgin Islands Historians will be held Saturday in the Guinea & West India Company Warehouse/Old Slave Market building at the corner of Company and Hospital Streets in Christiansted.
This year’s conference, which is being hosted by the National Park Service, will look at "Health in the West Indian Environment." Presentations will be made in two sessions beginning at 8:30 a.m. and concluding at 1:30. Both sessions are free and open to the public.
The first session will examine the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, who came to St. Croix in the 1830s to recover from tuberculosis. During his time here he made extensive observations about St. Croix, the community of people visiting for recovery from illness from the United States and abroad, and the daily routines of the Danish West Indies, according to an NPS news release.
The second session will discusses what historians know about the health histories of enslaved Africans and their descendants on St. Croix from 1803 to 1848 – the time the slave trade ended to emancipation.
Presenters during the first session will be Jose G. Rigau-Perez from the University of Puerto Rico; Wilfredo Geigel, an independent scholar from St. Croix; Annette B. Ramirez Arellano from UPR; Alma Simounet of UPR, Silvia E. Rabionet from UPR’s NOVA Southwestern campus; and Raul Mayo-Santana from the UPR School of Medicine.
Presenters during the second session will be Niklas Thode Jensen of the University of Copenhagen.
Further information is available by calling 1-340-772-3408.
