Judith Giesberg, PhD
Professor of History; Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Villanova University
Media
Social
Areas of Expertise
Biography
Dr. Giesberg has also produced and overseen a number of digital projects focused on African American communities during the war and postwar periods, in particular in the North. Among their number is "Last Seen," an effort to collect and digitize information wanted ads taken out by former slaves looking for loved ones lost in the domestic slave trade. Recently, Dr. Giesberg has written a book drawing from this archive—containing almost five thousand letters and advertisements placed by members of the "Freedom Generation"—to compile these individuals and families' stories in a narrative form for the first time.
Education
Boston College
PhD
Boston College
MA
Trinity University
BA
Select Media Appearances
Slavery Broke Apart Families. After Emancipation, How Did They Reunite?
The Washington Post
2025-04-16
Judith Giesberg's new book, "Last Seen," gives a far less idyllic picture of how formerly enslaved people connected—and more often, did not—with their lost families. In this deeply researched and beautifully written book, Giesberg, a professor of history at Villanova University, lays out the challenges of reunification, adding an important entry into the history of enslavement in this country.
"Last Seen" Review: Separated by Slavery
The Wall Street Journal
2025-04-10
Among the dark legacies of slavery in America was the sundering of Black families... Judith Giesberg's "Last Seen" explores the repercussions of these tragedies by investigating newspaper advertisements placed after the Civil War—often decades after the initial rupture—by men and women looking for relatives and friends.
The Unfulfilled Promises of Emancipation and Reconstruction
The Christian Science Monitor
2025-03-12
For those freed from bondage, the end of the Civil War was a time of great hope and promise as well as profound disappointment and loss... Separated families are the focus of Judith Giesberg's affecting book, "Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families."
"Last Seen": Searching for Lost Family After Slavery
WHYY's The Connection With Marty Moss-Coane
2025-03-07
Slavery in America ripped millions of Black families apart as they were sold, and often resold, in the years leading up to the Civil War. After emancipation, desperate mothers, fathers and children placed advertisements in and wrote letters to newspapers looking for their lost loved ones... Judith Giesberg has created a digital archive of the ads and letters and highlighted ten of these personal stories in her new book, "Last Seen."
"Last Seen": After Slavery, Family Members Placed Ads Looking for Loved Ones
NPR
2025-02-26
In 2017, historian Judith Giesberg and her team of graduate student researchers launched a website called "Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery." It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people who hoped to find family members separated by slavery... Giesberg says that when she's given public lectures about this online archive of ads, the audience always asks "the" question: "'Did they find each other?'"... Giesberg's new book, called "Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families," is her more detailed response to the question.
The Missing Persons of Reconstruction
The New Republic
2025-02-26
Numbering in the thousands and appearing all over the country for decades, notices came from mothers and fathers looking for their children, sons and daughters looking for their parents, spouses and army buddies seeking one another's whereabouts, and brothers and sisters eager for the slightest bit of intelligence about their siblings. With the help of her students, Judith Giesberg, a professor of history at Villanova University, has collected these materials for years and made the still-expanding archive of them publicly available on the internet.
At Mother Bethel, Villanova Professor Previews "Last Seen," Her Book About How Black Families Searched for Relatives Sold During Slavery
The Philadelphia Inquirer
2025-02-09
One year after the Civil War ended, Hagar Outlaw, a formerly enslaved woman in North Carolina, was desperate to find eight of her children who had been sold during slavery. She turned to Philadelphia's Christian Recorder and placed an "Information Wanted" ad... The story of Hagar Outlaw is one of 10 family narratives told in a new book, "Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families," by Judith Giesberg, a Villanova University history professor.
The Search for a Meaningful Clue to the Mystery of an Enslaved Ancestor
The New York Times
2022-08-06
In recent years, historians have digitized a trove of the ads, which appeared in more than 260 newspapers, offering a rare glimpse of the aspirations of the newly emancipated... Black people across the country were determined to reconstitute families shattered by slavery, and the ads reflected their "extraordinary will to keep searching for one another, despite all of the odds," said Judith Giesberg, a historian at Villanova University and the director of an archive entitled "Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery," a digital collection of more than 4,500 of the ads.
From Indentured Servant to University Benefactor: This Man's $10,000 Gift Helped Villanova Survive
The Philadelphia Inquirer
2020-03-20
For the 23-year-old Angelina Lincoln, it began with a class assignment from history professor Judith Giesberg, asking students to explore whether Villanova ever had ties to slavery... Lincoln could find no links. Instead, she encountered William Moulden.
Squirrel Oil, Raccoon Thighs and Tobacco Spit: Capt. Andrew Luck Is Back in the NFL Playoffs
The Washington Post
2019-01-04
With all the attention paid to the fictional Capt. Luck, might there be a Civil War officer whose story his mirrors—a young swashbuckler of another generation, felled by a lengthy injury only to return to glory?... If you're looking for a combatant who returned from serious injury to lead his soldiers to victory in battle, Oliver Otis Howard, the namesake of Howard University, is an option, said Judith Giesberg, a professor at Villanova University.
Jeff Sessions Is Wrong. Sanctuary-City Advocates Aren't Like Secessionists. They're Like Abolitionists.
The Washington Post
2018-03-06
"Claiming the mantle of Lincoln, Sessions compared today's opposition to the administration's immigration policies to 1860s proslavery secessionism, chastising sanctuary cities such as Philadelphia for being on the wrong side of history—and of the law... The problem with Sessions' analogy is that those driving sanctuary-city policies are the heirs to an entirely different states' rights tradition—one based in the North that helped to topple slavery, thanks to its resistance to immoral laws."
President Trump Is Playing Politics With the 2020 Census. It Could Backfire.
The Washington Post
2018-01-12
"The 2020 Census is set to take place at a time of political turmoil, when Americans are experiencing a crisis in confidence in federal institutions. Unfortunately, the census is likely to exacerbate that crisis, because the Trump administration has enlisted it in the work of maintaining Republican political control."
John Kelly Gets Civil War History Wrong
CNN
2017-10-31
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Tuesday defended White House chief of staff John Kelly, after his praise of Robert E. Lee as an "honorable man" and comments that the Civil War began because of "the lack of an ability to compromise"… Judith Giesberg, a Civil War historian at Villanova University, pointed out that the United States offered a number of compromises before the war erupted in 1861. She and others pointed to the Corwin Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have prohibited Congress from abolishing slavery.
"My Mother Was Sold From Me": After Slavery, the Desperate Search for Loved Ones in "Last Seen Ads"
The Washington Post
2017-09-07
Ten months after the Civil War ended, an enslaved woman who had been ripped away from her children started looking for them. Elizabeth Williams, who had been sold twice since she last saw her children, placed a heart-wrenching ad in a newspaper: "INFORMATION WANTED by a mother concerning her children," Williams wrote March 17, 1866, in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia. Her ad was one of thousands taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for lost relatives after the Civil War. Those ads are now being digitized in a project called "Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery," which is run by Villanova University's graduate history program in collaboration with Philadelphia's Mother Bethel AME Church.
"Information Wanted": Freed Slaves' Heartbreaking Ads Tell Personal Stories of Slavery
CBS News
2017-04-18
Margaret Jerrido is the archivist at Philadelphia's Mother Bethel AME Church, where stored away in boxes are historical gems. They're called Information Wanted ads. They were written by newly freed slaves looking for lost family members who were sold or ran away... Villanova University history professor Judy Giesberg came looking for them as part of a research project last August.
Select Academic Articles
Mary Elizabeth Massey and the Civil War Centennial
Civil War HistoryJudith Giesberg
2015
The story of the Civil War centennial reads like Greek tragedy. Set to open with delegates from various state commissions meeting in Charleston in April 1961, local arrangements would not guarantee a hotel room to an African American delegate, Madaline Williams, from New Jersey—nor could Williams expect to be welcome at luncheons or banquets. National centennial planners had ignored early warning signs of trouble, and as a result, the matter spilled over into the press, attracting the attention of the NAACP and the Kennedy White House. At the last minute, centennial planners moved the meetings from segregated downtown Charleston to a naval base. The change of venue ensured that delegates had a place to stay, but it failed to confront segregation and did not guarantee the full participation and safety of Black delegates. The centennial opened with national delegates meeting on the navy base and Confederate states' delegates meeting, in protest, in Charleston. Mired in controversy, the centennial never recovered.
"To Forget and Forgive": Reconstructing the Nation in the Post-Civil War Classroom
Civil War HistoryJudith Giesberg
2006
In John Bonner's "A Child's History of the United States," published in 1866, schoolchildren read about the brave actions freedmen took on behalf of the Union cause. They read, for instance, about a "black man, Tillman, a steward on board a [Union] vessel seized by a rebel privateer, and left on board of her with the prize crew, [who] rose one dark night,... and killed the prize captain and mate with an axe, and brought the vessel safely to the port of New York." Students were also introduced to a freedwoman washing the floors at a Union hospital who saved the life of a wounded and sick Union soldier whom doctors insisted was going to die. After days and weeks of caring for him "carefully and tenderly," feeding him with a spoon "as though he had been a baby," and sleeping on the floor while the sick soldier occupied her bed, the woman "had the pleasure of seeing her soldier completely restored to health." These and other events, Bonner explained, "dispel[led] the prejudice" against freedmen and opened the door for freedmen to serve as soldiers. Stories of brave freedmen and women convinced wartime Americans, and presumably Bonner's young readers, that "there was something manly in the negroes after all."
From Harvest Field to Battlefield: Rural Pennsylvania Women and the U.S. Civil War
Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic StudiesJudith Giesberg
2005
Historians estimate that half of all soldiers in the U.S. Army were farmers or farm laborers and an estimated thirty percent of all soldiers were married. A number of Northern women experienced the war as a withdrawal of labor from their farms and from their rural communities... With the departure of so many men, Northern women faced an altered set of domestic circumstances during the U.S. Civil War. The war opened up a space in which gender would be renegotiated and family relations reconstituted.
