Shane White is the Challis Professor of History and an Australian Professorial Fellow in the History Department at the University of Sydney. Nearly 70 years ago now the great novelist Ralph Ellison asked: 'Can a people live and develop for over 300 years simply by reacting?’ He went on: 'Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?’ Bearing this admonition in mind, White will talk about slavery, and the way white painters have depicted the so-called 'Peculiar Institution’. Slavery was central to American development in both the 18th and 19th centuries and its legacy still helps shape the United States to this day. Then the talk jumps to the 20th century to look at the Great Migration and examine those who, in search of what Richard Wright called 'the warmth of other suns’, moved to Harlem. In the 1920s, Harlem became the Negro Mecca, the Black Metropolis, the black capital of the world. It was a place of wonder that inspired the Harlem Renaissance. As the then recently coined Negro adage put it: 'I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than Governor of Georgia’.