Clemson University’s Historic Properties is bringing back its “Brick by Brick: Constructing America’s Identities” speaker series for the second year, featuring authors who will present different perspectives on the history of America’s built environment. In partnership with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and Clemson Annual Giving, the series will feature five events from June 17 to July 29.

The first lecture will be delivered by Dr. Peter Wood. 

Dr. Peter H. Wood was born in St. Louis and now lives in Longmont, Colorado. He studied colonial history at Harvard and Oxford. After working for the Rockefeller Foundation, he taught early American history at Duke from 1975 until 2007. His pioneering book on enslavement in the colonial era appeared last year in an expanded fiftieth-anniversary edition: “Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740.”

Wood has written articles on topics ranging from ancient dugout canoes in the Mississippi Valley to why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. He has contributed to several PBS productions concerning slavery, and he is an author for the major American history textbook “Created Equal.” He co-authored “Natives and Newcomers” (1983), a brief history of early North Carolina that won the American Historical Association’s Robinson Prize. This fall, Oxford University Press will publish a new edition of his brief survey entitled “Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America.”

Wood has worked with Houston’s Menil Foundation on its monumental project, “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” and has written three books on the American artist Winslow Homer. With Karen Dalton, he produced “Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years” (1988). Wood’s Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University became “Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream” (2004). His Huggins Lectures at Harvard University resulted in “Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War” (2010). That year, he received the Asher Distinguished Teaching Award given by the American Historical Association.