Celebrate Women's History Month while also honoring and lifting up voices that end perspectives of Black women, in particular, voices that for so many generations have been marginalized or left out entirely conversations within the academy and even within research library collections like this one. So I want to extend my sincere thanks to the vocal coordinators of today's event, Dr. Miriam Intritoror, and Brian Blocknell from the University Libraries, to the faculty and scholars who are joining in today's discussion, Jen Harvey, our events coordinator for managing the events and everyone involved in communications and work that went into today's event. I'm also especially grateful to Miriam for suggesting the recent acquisition of Anna Julia Cooper's book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, which I think is a really important volume, not only for the subjects and perspectives that it covers and addresses, but for the diversity of thought and perspectives it brings to our own collections here at the libraries. By virtue of that, from being available to students, faculty, and community of researchers, which I think is a comfort. So thank you for that. I'm really looking forward to today's discussion. I apologize I'm being able to say for the entire thing, but you're looking forward to it. And it is my pleasure to now introduce Dr. Miriam Intritoror. Hello everyone and welcome to honoring the legacy of the early Black women writers, the faculty round table. Thanks to all of you joining us here in person as well as the online. I'm Dr. Miriam Intritoror. I'm the verb of librarian here and I'm thrilled to be introducing today's event and our panel of speakers. Before we dive in, just a few logistics. For those of you who don't know, restrooms and water are past the elevators and to your left. I'll introduce each of the speakers. They will then each present and then we'll open up the conversation in such a good answer. There will also be time at the end to invite all of you to explore the rare books that we've brought along the windows there, each of which is relevant to today's topic. You'll be reminded again later, but if you do go look at the books, please plan to leave your belongings at your seat and library staff and students are there to help guide you. Also, we have to be out of the room by four, so we're going to keep to kind of a tight timeline. So now onto the main event. The inspiration for this roundtable, as Neil just mentioned, was our acquisition for the Rare Book Collection of a signed copy of the rare first edition of Anna Julia Cooper's book, A Voice from the South by Black Women of the South, which was published in Ohio in 1892 and it is on view in this room. In honor of this truly exciting acquisition and a pleasant history month in collaboration with Lauren Walker, the subject librarian for English, African American Studies, and numerous other departments, we put together this panel. Our intention is to highlight early Black women published authors, their lives, accomplishments, contributions, and legacies. Some of these authors and books have been in the rare book collection since well before my time here. Many, however, are a result of a very intentional collecting policy I've been pursuing with vital support from colleagues like Lorraine that seeks to acquire and ensure the preservation and representation of voices, perspective, experiences, and identities that have for too long been marginalized, if not entirely excluded from both collecting and from scholarship. Thank you. I'm here to learn more about these women, their writings, their impact, and what we have lost and continue to risk losing when we leave so many people out of the historical and academic record. I'll now introduce our panel in the order in which they will speak, beginning with Dr. Theta Gibbs Gray, who is joining us remotely today. Dr. Gibbs Gray is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the Patton College Department of Teacher Education. With over 21 years of experience and higher education, she committed to ensuring that classroom spaces are sites of justice and equity while honoring all students' humanity. Through her teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level, she supports pre-service and in-service teachers in creating culturally sustaining, literacy-focused, pedagogical practices. She also extends her teaching to pre-college programs, where she supports the writing development of first-generation students preparing for college. Her scholarship allows her to lift up the literacies of Black students honoring their humanity, identity, and history. Dr. Gibbs Gray is also committed to community-based partnership and has created literacy-based mentorship for girls with color and family literacy needs within local school districts. Through her Spencer-funded research, she co-created a year-long support system for Black girls, their parents, teachers, and school administrators to address the adverse effects of inequitable school discipline. She's proud to be from Detroit, Michigan, where she first learned the importance of community. Her parents and family instilled an early love for literacy, which set the foundation for her literacy identity. Dr. Ruzoma Miller is a visiting professor of African-American studies, public historian, and ethnographic college host. He earned his bachelor's degree in history from Morehouse College, his master's in political science from Jackson State University, and his doctorate in transformative inquiry from the California Institute of Integral Studies. By providing a theoretical basis for experiential learning as pedagogy, he built on 22 years of innovative, higher- and secondary education service through interdisciplinary fields and modalities across the Southeast region. He wrote 25 entries in Greenwood Press's Handbook of African-American Business, published in 2006, and a well-cited monograph, talented and free-dissited, in 2011. Miller is set to submit an anatomy of Africana experiential pedagogy at a Southeast Ohio University to the Journal of Autoethnography later this spring, which is based on his analysis of integrating primary research on Black history preserved at Ohio University in Athens and within the Southeast Ohio region into his fall 2022 courses, as in various ways students responded to such stimuli. Dr. Marilyn Judith Atlas, professor of English, specializes in American literature, particularly experimental, ethnic, and literature of faith. She was former Women's Studies director at Ohio University and studies minority and immigrant writers, how race and gender intersect in women's writing, the power of absence in literature, as well as how different art forms influence one another. In 2004, she received the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Mid-America Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Study of Midwestern Literature. She has written and lectured extensively on the Chicago Renaissance and Toni Morrison's fiction. She served on editorial boards for the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volumes 1 and 2, and serves on editorial boards of Mid-America and Midwestern miscellaneous. Dr. Mariana L. Ardontes is an associate professor of history and holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the history of slavery in African diaspora people in the Atlantic world. Her books, Black Townsman, Urban Slavery and Freedom in the 18th Century Americas, published by Palgrave in 2008, provides a comparative analysis of enslaved and free blacks as urbanizing Asians in the Americas. Her work is being published in various edited volumes in academic journals including in The Americas, The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, The Colonial Latin American Historical Review, The Journal of Family History, African Economic History, and Almanac. She is a recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK grant and a former fellow of the National Humanities Center. She is a founding member and currently serves on the executive board of the Global Urban History Project. Her work on global urban history includes three co-edited special journal issues and the Cambridge Elements book Early Modern Atlantic Cities co-authored with Emma Hart, which is worth coming this year. Her current project investigates families of mixed African and European descent in a colonial Brazilian municipality and their experiences with race, formation, and social mobility. Finally, Dr. Murdo Perez Sheldon sends her regrets that she is unable to join us today. Please join me in a very warm welcome to all of our panelists and a reminder to say all your questions for the event. Dr. Gibbs Grave, you'll go ahead and get us started. Okay. It may not be allowing me to share. Okay. Just a moment. I can share my screen if she wants to tell me when to advance the slides. Okay. Yeah, we have your slides here. So if you don't mind just saying next when you want to advance. Thank you so much. Jen Harvey will save the day. Give us a moment. Thank you, Jen. Okay. Perfect. Thank you so much. And can you hear me? Okay. Yes. Okay. Perfect. So hello again, everyone. Again, my name is Dr. Theda Gibbs Grave, and I'm so honored and delighted to be here. First, thank you to Dr. Intritor and Dr. Wokna. Thank you for both organizing this event and thank you to all of my colleague, my amazing colleagues who are sitting on this panel today. And thank you to each of you who have taken your time to be in community with us here today. The title of my presentation today is we were made to have a place black women's literary advocacy and resistance. And I was intentional about the first part of this title, so it connects to a work of poetry by one of the women that I will feature today, who is the amazing Francis E. W. Harper. And this book of poetry is called I was made to have a place. I thought about the generational legacy that writers like Francis E. W. Harper made, not just for black women, but for all of us. So I just transposed the title I was made to have a place and adjusted it a bit to we were made to have a place and I'll talk about the importance of making space and making safe space for black women and black women writers and the two pictures that you see in my presentation. They are intentional pictures. So like many of the women that we will talk about today, they wrote in a time and space where black women's lives their words and even the visual images that were represented that represented them were not always positive and they were stereotypical images. So it does my soul some good to find images that show their beauty, how dynamic they are, and are very intentional about how they're represented. So on the left is an illustration of Francis E. W. Harper. And on the right is a picture attached to illustrations of Anna Julia Cooper, who we will also talk about today, and we'll advance to the next slide. Thank you. So there are five key areas, focal areas that I will briefly touch on today and the time that we have. The first is creating a legacy of black women provocateurs, sharing pieces of the life of Francis E. W. Harper, honoring Francis E. W. Harper as an early womanist and anti racist educator, humanizing black women's emotions and embodiment. So we'll move on to the next slide. In the next slide, if you just take a few seconds to peruse the pictures. So again, the choosing of these pictures is very intentional. The illustrators and the designers of each of the photos were intentional about highlighting the beauty and brilliance, not just the physical beauty, but the spirits of each of the women who are here. And so I'll continue in terms of this idea of place making for black women. And I thought about this idea of writing to prepare a place for you. So this also connects to if many of you saw the recent film that focused on Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Arrivo sings a very powerful song that it connects to a biblical thought and concept of I go to prepare a place for you. And so I also thought about this title and transpose it again to our right to prepare a place for you, that each of the women that we talk about today, they were intentional about not only writing themselves into history but writing themselves into history so that black women would not be forgotten, and would be humanized in ways that we have not been. So the writers that we're talking about today they created a continuing legacy of black women provocateurs. And what I mean by provocateurs are women who write, not just to write, but to write for social change. They write in critical ways that make us each think, regardless of our positionality and our identity. Their writing is meant to result in some type of positive movement. And in that way they are amazing provocateurs. So at the bottom you'll see Tony Morrison, you'll also see bell hooks. At the top, you will see Sonya Sanchez and next to her, Monique Morris, Zora Neil Hurston, and Shirley Chisholm. All women who in different ways utilize their writing for academic purposes for public writing for lecturing for political reasons that have essentially continued to write the importance of black women's lives inside of each of their platforms. And we'll go to the next slide here. So specifically for the rest of the presentation for the remainder of there should be about three more slides that will focus on I will specifically focus on the dynamic life of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper.  There's so much that is left out here. And I'm hoping that each of us will follow up and do our own diligence and do research. So I was really excited to build upon what I already knew and engage upon research and I learned so much more than I already did. And in continuing to be excited about searching for more information. First, it's always important how we situate black women. And so it's important for me to say that she is a worthy black women woman starting from an asset based perspective is very important for a number of different reasons. She was an abolitionist and early women's rights advocate for all women, and she was an early womanist. So the difference here is that in addition to her advocating for all women's rights. She specifically advocated for the rights of black women, and she appealed to the masses to remind them that if if no woman is free that black women are not free as well. We can talk about the collective nature of what she wrote about and appealing to our moral and instances. She was born a free woman in 1825, and she was born in in a state that was still a slave holding state. Think about the context in which she lived where she where she was able to move about as a free woman, but not in all cases she still had to be careful. So there were certain parts of the state that she could not enter into, which led her to not come back to her state for many years in fear of being captured, although she was a free woman. As a teen she became a seamstress and a nurse made to a white family that owned a bookstore, and her passion for books grew within the shop. She later lived with abolitionist William and Patricia George steel, and much of her writing transitioned to writing that advocated for the abolition of slavery. So as we know for the next 40 years of her life was still very active, and we'll move to the next slide here.  What I think about is that often in dominant society, we don't often name scholars and abolitionist and writers like, like Francis Harper. I do, we're able to name amazing women black women like bell hooks, right, and other women who are and Tony Morrison, and Alice Walker, and Angela Davis, who are womanist and who argue for the importance of making sure that women of color and black women are inserted in feminism. So here is really important for us to think about how, as an early writer, she was also an early womanist. And if we look at an in an early anti racist advocate. So if we look to the left her quote says I know that no nation can gain its full measure of enlightenment and happiness if one half of it is free. The other half is feathered. So here she is talking about what is happening in terms of the bondage that was still existing that that maintained an oppressive and horrible system of slavery that impacted African American humans. And here she's again appealing and saying we can't think about our own enlightenment, we cannot be enlightened, unless all of us are enlightened. And similarly in the second quote she says we are all bound up together and one great bundle of humanity and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse and its own soul. Here again she's appealing to morality, and she's saying it's not only that we're connected to each other, it's that we have to understand that it serves no one.  So what I thought about as I was reading through and just studying these words, it connected to an interview, and I think that many of you may have seen this interview that focuses on the author Toni Morrison. Originally Bill Moyer's interview Toni Morrison, and he asked a question to her and said, you know, when will you start writing about white people. Why are you so focused on focus on on centering black women in the black experience. At what point what will it change. And at multiple points in her life, many journalists asked her variations of the same question. They asked her to justify why she was centering her writing on black women and the black experience. So I was really intrigued by her response and how much it connects to many of the words of Francis Harper. Toni Morrison basically says the people who practice racism are bereft. There is something distorted about the psyche. When you take it away. What are you without racism. It's wasteful. It's ugly, and it doesn't serve any of us. So in the same way Francis Harper has given permission to writers like Toni Morrison to ensure that they're reminding us of the collective nature of our humanity, and that although power and privilege seem to seem to be a benefit to some of us that is actually not when we think about what it's doing to our souls and the inner fibers of our being and we'll move to the next slide. So here, Francis Harper also focused on humanizing black women's lives. So she wanted to make sure that we didn't continue experiencing dehumanization. And this is something that that black women still experience. If you're if you're familiar with black women often being positioned as angry as aggressive, simply when we share basic emotions that we know that anger is the basic human emotion. But in dominant society, often when black women display their anger and they're not causing harm to anyone else, they are still structured as aggressive. Another way our humanity is stripped away by making it seem like we don't experience pain. And this is you know this is also a major issue when we think about the health and health implications for black women that long ago saw that because black women didn't endure pain, or could endure significant amounts of pain that we were not giving pain to our education or our safety and our care was something that wasn't thought about when pain was something that was a part of our life. So in this particular poem, it's called Aunt Chloe. And I will let you know that it does focus on a woman who is enslaved and she is experiencing her children being taken away. Part of the excerpt goes this way. I remember well remember that dark and dreadful day when they whispered to me Chloe, your children's sold away. It seemed as if a bullet had shot me through and through, and I felt as if my heart strings was breaking right into.   And what is it doing to our souls to be able to continue to advocate for such a system as slavery to exist. And we'll move to the next slide. So as we think about, you know what this means for us moving forward.  So talking about it in this space is very important. Being able to actually touch and read the books that our colleagues have so thoughtfully allowed a space to exist at OU is really important. But this work is ongoing work right it is work of our souls. It is work of us remembering our individual humanity and each others. So it's important that we remember as black women we are worthy witnesses. So for your black women colleagues for your black women students and family members to remember that we are worthy our feelings and our experiences are worthy and what does it look to hold space to affirm our experiences as opposed to denying them or explaining them away. For black women to remember that we possess a long literary ancestral lineage and that this also helps us to engage in ancestral healing. When we think about the pain that black women have experienced, including the writers that we experienced today, while they experienced joy. There is a space and time for us to think about how can we in the living in the now practice healing back to those generations that experienced so much. How do we counter the erasure and invisibility of US history. You know what our colleagues in the library have done have made sure that part of US history black history and Ohio history because there are many rich Ohio connections are uplifted. How can we engage in critical introspection. So for ourselves, even if we don't identify as black women, how do the things explored impact us personally and collectively because they do. They do inside our classrooms inside of our colleges inside Athens and all the communities in which we live and exist. And as a campus community, how do we commit to learn more about black women's experiences. Women's rights history and abolitionist history, because this again is a space that is rich with so much that is valuable for each of us to know. So I thank you and before I end, I also again as I'm thankful to Dr. Intra tour and Dr. Wokna. I also want to acknowledge one of our colleagues who is not with us today. Dr. Bayena Jeffries, who is a former department chair at OU and a dear colleague and friend who was one of the first people at OU who helps me to understand the importance of integrating rare books that focus on many of us who have been marginalized. So again, collectively, thank you so much for this opportunity. And I look forward to hearing from our additional colleagues. Thank you. Thank you. My comments for what has been featured today, 1892 voices of south wasn't south by black women's up to south. So briefly, we're training in the discipline of history. My orientation is always to start with context for brief context. And as we are Cooper, the speaker, author, educator, a transformative pedagogue or teacher, community advocate and racial and gender champion. I'll start with the familiar context to set the tone. As Caitlyn Gine's notes, she presumed that her father was the mother's master, adding that her mother was always too modest and shame face ever to mention. With this one sentence. Cooper capital both life of enslaved black women of that time being untutored and sexually exploited, as well as the significant triumph learning to read and write against all. So this is the backdrop in which. Cooper is born in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her early educational training is what we will now refer to as the story of the black college university. Augustines, although at that time post slavery. They were now what we think of as universities now in the state of the logic, upwards of 8% of the population back Americans at that time functionally literate. So just like everyone is wrong before you can learn college education, you have to learn primary and secondary education. They speak to you correlation is significant. She also developed the very early on. Age 10 1112 adolescence, a pension for. Agitation with the cause of equality of humanity. By way of her lens as a black Mormon specifically. As early as before she completes her studies and ends up. Up the road to old woman where she will get her master's and her bachelor's in mathematics, but she studies the classics and classics and context of classics. Think of. Classics in the context of what's broken the Western European. Rightly wrongly indifferent, but I'm going to come to that point, which is one of my major points that I want to suggest that everything she did. It was intentional. So even the use of the classics. It was not as an ivory tower intellectual looking down upon the lesser fortunate to the contrary. Her orientation throughout the deeds of her life indicate the opposite that her orientation was a bottom up. Whereas we are celebrating uplifting her now. The reality is that during her time. He was ostracized. On every level and every front. Yet and still. As we educate us try to impart on our students impact cannot be taken away. And impact comes in many forms. So in the interest of time, let me pick it up a little bit, but she focuses and her training is in the classes. Even at St Augustine's normal school. This sense of evidence of her being one of the main cogs in appealing to the patriarchal teachings of only the boys learning the classics. This will continue at all. She is one of the early for runners and presenters of again. Bring attention to the inequality for women. And one quote that stands out. Excuse me. So she leads St Augustine goes to Oberlin completes her bachelors and 1884 and a master in 1887. The preeminent work though it's important to know this is not her. It's our most recognized work. But like many people, particularly when you are marginalized. Works don't always constitute. A published book. And so another part of the land that I bring and bring to table is that the public historian and former archivist so working with records and documents and tools to build and reconstruct history. So when we bring those into consideration, there are numerous examples of her types of work. The most celebrated voice of the South 1892. This text reconceptualize the dominant tenants of stability or the idea of stability, freedom and equality. Implements musical metaphor applied sarcasm. And it compels readers who radically evaluate the ways in which recognize social change to the focus of my talk. And I know which pan African may not come up through many search and association with her name. I want to point out four examples of where I feel this can be seen. And then after this has as many as with all philosophies is not one size fits all the different manifestation and explicit. Another example. Olivia here, who is a fan African American classes is Jewish author educator and publisher.  Ethics in the context of the ethics we learn in the European classical can. But. Heron does not associate this with something that was explicitly taught to her by Cooper. The link is growing up in Washington DC. The imprint of Cooper as a pedagogue a teacher for over 30 years is absolutely undeniable in Washington DC. Heron graduated from school and her mother graduated from the school Douglas high school, which at the time was called M Street, which would be colored high school. But the point is. Cooper was also. One of the early practitioners performance of, if you will, so practically method, etc. But this idea that learning is more than the memorization, romanization of facts, names, dates, etc. Instead, transformative education, the center of the fund engagement where you're motivating and putting students in a position to engage with ideas content, establishing an own philosophy based on what they have been exposed to. But how heron makes this connection with Cooper is that. She is in the archives where she has a fellowship. And she's doing research. But the connection is, she associates what she was learning about Cooper from reading voice of the South, this idea in the spirit of not just accepting what the mainstream presents to you. So specifically, how does this may sound, and I would suggest it's still prevalent for the masses of us in the room and otherwise. The connection of an African derived hero. She wrote is not as prevalent as we may think. So, her and in her research, and again, she's creating the inspiration for this, but she comes across a work called the heart of Ethiopia in 1914 by Maurice Corvette. She's building across miscellaneous material. Again, it's the time as there are many students in here. Remember research prefix means read, which means again, and again, and again, you cannot find and probably will not find the golden nugget without due diligence, and you can find many things in miscellaneous on us. There is a biblical reference, Simon of Syria. Serenity is in Libya, Northern Africa. But one of Cooper's writings, use better form language to essentially present a non binary conceptualization of man and woman, but the connection that she's making is, and I will quote using Simon Serenity. This quote. Excuse me. Yes, this quote comes from Shirley movie journey. And it says in Simon Serenity. Well, one elect throughout the ages to play his part in the drama with Asia betrayed in Europe crucified Africa, predestined to come forward only gladly to give service. The peculiar contribution of Ethiopia's blame less breaks. Whoa. Again, what I'm suggesting here is not that and Julia Cooper is a garbage. Fan after this and the traditional market for side garbage to me that does not matter. The range of African consciousness and positive imagery of a black ideal is equally significant in my last. Next example. In 1923. While she is a teacher at industry. Which is a little point you become principal love, you don't have the time to get into with the record clearly shows while she was the principal not just as a black principal not just as a woman principal, but as an educator. She was producing black scholars that went off to the best institutions in the country. As well as historically black. Nonetheless, it's intended that she produces a she has a student producer play in 1923, which centralizes quote excuse me African contributions to humanity through the production of the funny. And Latin epic point written by a version between 29 and 19 BC. Intentionality. Again, this is one aspect that I'm focusing on numerous aspects and we focus on, but I bring what I see is often that the audience, or the most tangible, but we still find these threads. Another quick point to show and indicate the gender inequality to say it mildly is even African American patriarchy by her colleagues of the time, many of whom we were here. And I would suggest rightfully so, but we still be critical right of gentlemen such as WB Du Bois, Elaine Lock, Carter G Woodson, Charles this Johnson, Charles Wesley, and in fact, and indeed property Washington. The point is, and I believe Cooper amongst many things was a philosopher, not a woman philosopher, not a black philosopher, even though she those things to her record. Her scholarship. Though she was exercised and marginalized. When you read her colleague that site her reference her. She was very much part of the conversation. Lastly, her dissertation. When she completed her mid 60s from the Sorbonne in France, she started her dissertation earlier in Columbia, but the cut to the chase, I could wrap it up the title for dissertation in English, Francis attitude towards slavery during the French and Haitian Revolution. 1925 by African American woman, it's been in French and France, whereas this is couch information now that in and of itself is the same. Nonetheless, it wasn't just ceremonial. This work parallels the voice of dissertation and suppression of the African slave trade to the United States of America 1863 1870. Expands how one reads text and potentially grounds through a process of rattling with the interrelationship between the colonized and the colonizer. It also speaks to the complexity. Again, complexity, not to implicitly. We're looking at that image related to the body politic. She addresses morality of the enslaved. The addresses the underdevelopment of Africa, which foreshadows both the writings how Europe underdeveloped African 1972. They also also are parallels with France phenomenon, black skin white man 1952. Not so much from the lens of what they are arguing, but I use this as a reference because. French originates from Martinique, French colonized Martinique, he was a student in Paris, and he was a medical doctor in Algeria. So the application of some of the extensions of what Cooper is talking about in her dissertation. The complex racial class hierarchy that emerges in France and Haiti influence organization of abolition causes specifically she looks at the society of the friends of the blacks and how this entity will become a partner, if you will, the Jacobics. Lastly, on this point, frankly, the Caribbean philosophical association's best paper, presented by getting scholar at their previous years. Dr. Crawford, his name, and Anna Julia Cooper's honor. And I'll close there. I'm walking out was there my better not be this for now the same. Who helped us get to this moment of artifacts and artifacts and the added. Um, it was just an article on by Deborah elections. Because there had been some discussion about whether you should wear gloves when you're looking at your books. And let's just added to the conversation that she had held a hug on one. And then it was stained with wine because the hug is the book that's used during Passover services, it tells the retelling of the freedom of getting out of Egypt. It was stained in line and she said how, how more precious was it that it was an artifact that had been touched. But the worst thing to do to a book is not to stay in a respectful to be there to add your day DNA to the reading to the real reading of the requirement is to read the whole book. That books were very, very complex artifacts. They told the history of a certain time and a certain place and a certain person from a certain family background, etc. And it was it's really important to note where that book comes from and how it has legs and what it could have been. And there have been others. And I guess that's the center of my few minutes of remarks is, first of all, you should know, I'm very thankful that this book exists in our library so you can go and look at a first edition, the real deal. But Henry Louis Gates, who seems to be there at the right right moment so often, has through penguin given us the portable Anna Julia cool. Not, you know, 2022, you can all get it. Next $20 cheaper if you do something terrible like supporting Amazon. Regardless, it exists and it helps because it contextualize. And I'm all for context. But as my poor students know, I will offer reading the text. Slowly and carefully, because we honor doesn't come from pretending someone was perfect. But we honor comes from seeing what they said who they were. I think it's really, really important and that does change what you think about them. For better and for worse, we're lucky we're living in a time that's not either or that's not so black and white, but you can be hybrid or intersectional. We know that depending on what you're identifying within a certain day that's going to change how you look at something and let you know. And I don't want to idealized Cooper who doesn't need my idealization. She's amazing. She's wonderful. She's the fourth PhD of a black woman in America. And she doesn't need my permission. But I do want to take a look at who she might have been in a different world, however, writing those assets, because this is a book of assets that she wrote when she was third she published at 36. Earlier, where she had the nerve to take on William Dean House and he had written a book. I'll give you the name of it because she absolutely hated.  She had a period of duty where he sent his book on a woman who had my colleague called down the book probably a woman who was 1560 white, but had the compulsion to help her keep it. And she said, Oh, give me with a spoon of that expression has been used. Give me a break. This is 16th date, you know, black. I know you probably didn't mean harm. But don't run about my people in this way because it places my blood pressure. Basically, you can read it. It's an essay. It's really a wonderful, wonderful essay. This was pretty early in William Dean House fictional career. He's a great writer in many men's ways, and he was never with African American. The rise of Silas Lapham. He's got to walk in his ghost, and you can't get into what they do or who they are and how they fit into this book about the rising with the class. But she, it was published in 91. This was published in 92 it must have been one of the later essays though it's a middle one. I can give you the name of the essay that that is in. One face on there can literally just that is how the nine essays it's nearly the end. But what she also does. And again, the context is complicated. If she really honors her future store, because she likes that depiction of him. She's living in a time. Alice fairs is looking to Washington. We're not getting people, then she is a really good thing. She doesn't want to rock the boat. It's the culture. Women aren't supposed to be sexual. You deal with the whole nine yards of what it needs to be the body human. Nor can she nor can she consciously it's too much to ask of a person. She's she's not against enough. And I just want to read you one letter that she wrote, because not because it's central, but because it's telling if that makes sense to you, because it gives us an insight of what pushed her buttons. And let's me see if I can find that for you very, very quickly. It's Tuesday nine of this. Easy to use. Doesn't require archival work. Thank God for just a minute that's plenty else to do I'm sure. But I just it's very short. I just wanted to put you for you. The editor of the tribute is a pity. That the high note of your editorial page should be initiated by a selection that presents the very opposite ideal from the one you so ably advocate. Basically mind of the paper as the tribute, which condemns the aimless and handy as pernicious propaganda and a vicious caricature of the race should allow midnight man to strut and wiggle through the same page. We're on we find earnest advice from children's reading. Most surely have been an oversight. A full survey of Langston Hughes poetry ought to furnish. I am sure some sample of his genius. More in keeping with the high standard announced by the tribute. Then this navigating portrait of a color. My criticism is not against use for writing about whatever he sees and happens to know. But I do object to pictures of the gutter and store being called it rated by preference from all the ennobling and inspiring examples of art. That present themselves the examples that are just as true to life. Just as humanly appealing and just as artistically accepted. Walt Whitman did much that was course and vocal. This is poetic creations. When one has to weigh through his unexpurgated works to find it. So much. You will not be confronted with the filth of leaves of grass on the editorial pages of a kind of politics. It's not from a race squeamishness either. But a mere matter of literary taste and fine selection according to the internal fitness. Well, we know this eternal fitness of things. Is framed within a very middle class world that leaves marginal people extremely. I just remember early in her career and I've not read all her work. But these essays these texts. While they are wonderful in so many ways. She's totally for education. She takes southern women to task for a sisterhood. Not there. And I don't know if her essay shows her desire for education and her writing shows for artistry. She divides in one essay writers between the hundred preachers which includes Milton. And artists who are much more into aesthetics for aesthetics. And I think, while she tends to sing herself as a preacher. But in that frame, she also was an artist. These are really, really powerful relevant essays. And she's a philosopher and one of all human she gets to change her mind on the age of 36. Thank God, otherwise we would all be injected dropping steps on a 20. You have to get there to get over it. But I just wanted to mention some of some of that stuff to me. She represents. Her silence is kind of the agri and rich. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. There are things she cannot even say to herself. And I wonder, and I'll end with this comment. I wonder what her thinking would have been like. He actually been able to read. Henry Louis Bates discovered this in 2005. Our Nick. An African American kind of autobiography novel whose central character was a trickster. Not available to her. Never mentioned in any of these essays. I read the essays waiting for a comment. On that text and on incidents that have a life of a slave girl. She knew nothing about that text. Nothing. Nothing about Harriet Beecher Stowe's two children that she chose to have with a lawyer slash member of the House of Representatives to avoid the continual onslaught of a man she named Dr. Flint. She was writing during the time where black people were still. It was pre civil war. And she changed her name to Linda Brandt and the people that she knew. But that book through Linda Brandt. And it is autobiographical. I mean, periodically allows for female sexuality Linda burnt at two children before she was 20. She screams up and notes that screaming is the wrong word. She says repeatedly she was not great. And she still mentions that 11 something like I think the number is 11. The lot of children were the children of Dr. Flint. Why would she have not been. What would have kept her from being raped other than she was afraid. She said that it would have diminished her in the eyes of a world that saw women as sullied once they had been touched. You couldn't you you you could not not be the responsible for your own abuse during that era or may last by. It's such an interesting text I wonder having been available and we've not lost it. Lydia Maria child framed it by saying hey this woman's real she can write. She can teach. This is her book. But then it got lost. And by the time. This 90 this 1892 work was written by Cooper. It wasn't available to me. So she did it. But she did it. Through a limited lens a lens that would have not been there had we had libraries like ours collecting books that were major. And I love the Internet. In terms of research and that's a good ending but I love doing research on it. We need the real deal. We need the real books that I so appreciate our spending the money and the time and the energy to get those books and I have three more. I could talk for a few hours but I won't. Right over. Rare books in our library it's a real privilege to have this for that and I hope everybody will set up an appointment and go and look at these books and work with them. I think the team invited me to participate in this panel right as a historian of the African diaspora in the America so I think comparative work with Brazil and the United States and I think about that I asked about all of the Americas. I thought I would talk about the, the lost intellectual contribution of Athens and their descendants to our Western culture, and what historians of the African diaspora point out to be a lack of recognition that African descendants should have an intellectual history. Usually right when you studied the history of Africans and their descendants in the US in the Americas right it's through the lens of slavery and abolition social problems that either economic contribution. There's not a recognition of their intellectual input. And people have been rallying against that and trying to point out the ways in which in fact they are part of our intellectual tradition. Then, I'm still going to talk a little bit about that, but then something right happened last week that make me feel at this discussion in the light of the books and and into the Cooper in particular makes it really important to address, which was the introduction of the Ohio Senate bill. It's called 83 right, the Ohio higher higher agent patient bill in the Senate. So this is still being discussed. It hasn't been passed. Some of you might be aware of this bill. It follows the trend set by other state bills that aim to regulate aspects of higher education. It proposes to change ways that state universities operate and how faculty can teach. But one of the things that it proposes is to make it a requirement that all students in Ohio State universities have to take an American history course. And or an American government course and you might think well that's not a real problem right we live in the United States why not. Another framing it is also they are requiring these courses to teach the texts right so they're dictating what types we have to learn what types we have to teach students. And by the way, they want all students to take a cumulative exam at the end of the semester which is something I never do so. Where you soon will be tested on these texts and the text the list that the bill poses are the entire Constitution of the United States the entire declaration of independence, a minimum of five essays of the federalist papers. The entire emancipation proclamation the Gettysburg address. And then Dr. Dr. Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail so one concession to the one one African American figure right in our in our intellectual cultural tradition. So, I would ask right does it seem that there are any voices missing.  And, okay, to be sure at the list does not mean other texts not be taught just that these have to be taught right, but I would argue one that these lists, when they're proposed, and when they're taken seriously. They do have this problematic impact of setting a certain standard of what is relevant, and by that standard, right, defining what might be irrelevant, right, which, which is problematic to I would also say that I teach us history up until reconstruction. We all teach these, right, we teach their content, but we don't necessarily force students to read these texts, right, because it's often more important to help students understand the context in which these texts were produced. Right. And usually we do so through other texts, right, that we have students read. And so the context is the intellectual idea the social political economic issues, and often the contentious debate that informed the production of these documents right and that's what we want students to understand wants them to examine that I want to engage with these texts critically. And so, when we do that there's so much more room for introducing different voices right there's a need in fact to to introduce different voices so that we can understand the types of discussions right and complications and consensus that went into shaping the trajectory of the United States. Now we know that these legislative efforts right to regulate higher education are premised in this misguided politicization of academic conference schools and universities and, you know, to put it really bluntly, the concern that some express is that this critical engagement with the history of the culture, the literature and current events of the United States would undermine patriotism, right, wouldn't want to undermine white crime. And this misguided politicization has some people arguing that then the same local governments should dictate what the academic content is. And the danger here that is, as I said before, not so much what would be demanded of students but what would be excluded right what you would lose access to. The idea that there could be an ideological, an ideologically neutral right of necessary checks is a fallacy right. There's no can and that is not ideologically important and we can decide there's a cannon but we all have to examine why these particular texts were chosen we have to engage with them critically right. And we have to, but we have to make sure that in those choices we don't need more other people. And this is what these words that are exposed here remind us of right that when you do that right when we ignore other voices when we fail to appreciate other work. There's a lot that we need. And Phyllis, so I'm going to reference here Phyllis we believe Harry and Jacob Francis hard but then my colleague talked about earlier Anna Julia Cooper which I'll talk more about in a minute. They did face this exclusionary environment during their lifetime right that minimizing the relevance of their work. And particularly, as Dr Miller pointed out right undermine the fact that they were speaking to a broader society they were speaking to broader intellectual pursuits not just, you know, for a small community of educated black people. And as a result of being excluded that way. The legacy of their intellectual contributions have been unrecognized right and more recently there has been attempts to recover that. Julia Cooper's dissertation was translated like 20 years ago right publishing translated only 20 years ago. So people have been trying to recover this work. And we're so lucky we have access to them here. But this has not been an easy trajectory and often this time their work right can still be pigeonholed into like very niche. Historical and literary spaces. Harry Jacobs work is usually published along other slave narrative works, whereas, you know, it is a work about human rights about women's rights about month the experience of motherhood it's so rich. Right. But a lot of these works end up being taught and consumed in these very niche ways that again deny these women the ability to talk to a much broader audience and to deny them the recognition that they're participating in much broader debates right. And just to give you a little taste of the uphill battle that they faced during their lifetime I do want to go back to Thomas Jefferson icon of American everything. In his notes on the state of Virginia, if you guys have read it right he makes these comments about black people in their place in America. Right. And he's very explicit in saying that all the ways in which they're inferior to white people and he specifically says that they're inferior in reason. Right. So he says they're there. I, and I quote here as I, I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations that you could. You're wrong. She's perfectly capable of engaging with, you know, the ancient thinkers. He also accuses them of not having any imagination or imagination is dull, tasteless and anomalous. He says that and I quote never yet could I find that is black had uttered a thought above the level of playing narration. And says, said that they're incapable of poetry. And speaking of Phyllis Wheatley. Right. And I quote says, the compositions published under her name, any sensation the author right published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. Right. So this is Jefferson in 1783. And those ideas of African Americans, unsuitability, unsuitability or inability of intellectual pursuits. Gain space and in the national imagination right and they persisted throughout the 19th century into the early to 20th century, leaving a very lasting harmful effect. Right in the way we think about intellectual American intellectual history and you'll belongs there to my colleagues that they're making a place right who has a place. And yet, you know, these ideas were so much part of those debates debates about how government would evolve. What's the meaning of freedom, what should be the role of education and the labor in the development of our society and how society should provide itself with the well-being and advancement of black people and black women in particular. So now getting back to any Julie Cooper's and if you leave Cooper's work. And the essays that are in the this book we just acquire. She makes so many important contributions that when you read it, you think, if only if only these ideas have the part of the debate at the time. Where could we have been, you know how things could have gone. So, for instance, right in this essay entitled womanhood a vital element in the regeneration progress of race. She celebrates the future promise of American institutions, but notes that elevation. That the elevation of the status of African Americans in this country still dealing with legacy of slavery would only be complete when black women can experience their womanhood without violence and independent of male patronage.  And the higher education of women, which is another essay, she argues that women should not be required to diminish themselves to satisfy the demands of men. Right, because it was this idea that if women became too educated things just become unpleasant for men. Right, so she argues that that should not be our pursuit. Instead, right, women should be allowed to advance themselves through education to then encourage men to improve themselves so that they meet maybe worthy of women and therefore all society can come back. I think all the women in the room can relate to that. You know, I appreciate this idea. Right and wouldn't we benefited so much from having these ideas part of the debate at the time. In another essay, entitled hasn't there a race problem. If so, how can it be solved. She makes a convincing argument for diversity and inclusion 150 years before we were even talking about this right. And she states that and I quote the community that closes its gates against foreign talent can never hope to advance beyond a certain result to keep our out foreigners, and you keep out progress. She then recast the idea of problem right to argue that the black presence in the United States. You know, it's not so much problematic as it is and I quote a guarantee of the perpetuity and progress of America's institution, because she argues very convincingly in this essay that diversity promotes healthy debate and prevents stagnation. And then she calls everyone to vote for the love of humanity. Stop the mouth of those learn theorizers, the expedient longers. Don't let them argue, as if there were no part to be played in life by black men and black women, and as if to become white were the universal solvent for all America's irritations. Finally, in the essay, what we are work. She examines the question of the relevance of black people to be the West and she borrowed very. She does very well, barring from economic principles and through a discussion about the investment society makes some people and what it gains in return. I took this economy of generating capital by spending capital and generating capital. She then lists the crucial contributions of black people's labor, but also various inventions and intellectual and artistic production. And she basically says the capital invested in this population has been minimal and the return. And she challenges then American and its institutions to recognize what they have received from black people by then investing more in black men and women. And again, right, how beneficial, how even though the revolution would have been in the late 19th century, early 20th century had paid greater attention to Google's ideas about diversity and social distinction. So, as I said in the beginning, historians of the African diaspora has have for some years now emphasized this need to recognize the intellectual contribution of Africans and their descendants to the development and trajectory of our country, but also of our western world. These works. Divided here today. I've been doing a complete writing reminders that would still need to do that better. And that we need to reject any political attempt to limit. Again, right. What was being done in the 19th century, kind of being trying to write an attempt to do it again today. So we have to reject any political attempts to limit what should be considered the canon. Doing so limiting the canon means risking missing out on the richness of these arguments and their ability to push our public today is about how these words were published at such an early. You know, time in the world, you know, that's one main question. Thank you. I don't know. I just know that it was, but that's a very good research question to find out exactly how it was. I suspect you were pretty darn well connected. I'm at a very young age that she was a brilliant student. And that she had mentors who were pushing her. You know, we have gone through with American literature for the 1830s and 1860s or more like Margaret Fuller who were writing essays like me and first of man, woman versus women. And also in her 1843 text. Okay, I discussed it as does Cooper. The role of native American, which is a big part of the early thinking of Anna Julia Cooper. So, and she was definitely a world. We will talk about that, which has demonstrated she was a woman, not just of America, but who knew languages. But I don't know exactly the trajectory. I mean, someone had all ruined. You couldn't finish her PhD at Columbia. She went to the serve on, but she had no choice. I don't understand. Now about the publishing of those files. Why she couldn't complete her initial got over working long again. Some research suggests that, well, her familial. For instance, but she didn't have any biological children. But much of her work through education. Would be analogous in some ways the likes of old treasure for social work. If you took in family members children, they found nature from some of the sources are going on. But the can also the connection with. Paris is that a French. Essentially in DC. Like evaluating some bars before in street school. And notice her prowess as an administrator. That's awesome. And so she was a transfer he helped her. Negotiate some of her friends. Well, what I know about the history of. When you look when you look at the African diaspora that should. If you think about the positive works that he led to so much worse in Latin America, because printing. Later in the beginning places like Brazil. And then it's very elite concentrated around people, whereas the US since the colonial period had a strong tradition of printing through subscription. Right. So people who are a member of. Literary societies or discussion. Rooms or what we're all connected to generate a subscription list, meaning people would be willing to buy their boat again with published and take that to a publisher. And that would guarantee at least, you know, compensating for the cost of printing that work. So there was a lot of printing done that way. And then there were right associations that were actively trying to promote certain types of literature. So the abolitionist societies were very active. In sponsoring right publications of words like Harry J. and others. And there were some, I don't know if these essays were for first came out in newspapers, but sometimes right there were also. You know, essays printed in literary magazines or newspapers that would then once there was like a demand for that offer. Then press the printing house. This book would be interested in publishing it as well. So there have there have to be some activism in a way, right? These works out and using these connections to publishes work but. But it is, it is kind of impressive how much into work was produced in the United States in the 19th century, if you compare the other parts of the Americans of the year because. There were printing presses, most most big cities had to be pressed. People who ran newspapers were interested in publishing templates or essays or something that would also sponsor their printing. We had an American review and we had William came out to go into months later, which is during this period of time. No, it's a great question. I don't. I don't exactly know the answer. One thing that you'll see if you go over and look at the books is some of the pasting publishers repeated something else that you'll see a couple of times. It's published for the author, which means again there was some sort of funding that was created that made it possible for this to happen. Phyllis we believe it's the earliest, of course, 1773 she did have to go to London to get her books published once it was out. It was very popular in the United States as well as in Britain, but she did have she could not find a publisher in America. And some of her work was first published in certainly journals with gentlemen Monday and a couple of others. So I think it's a combination of all those factors, but it's a great question and a sort of a study of that history would be fascinating. And we switch back to your microphone. So Dr. Gibbs Gray can answer as well. Thank you so much. Yeah, Dr. Gibbs Gray. Sorry, did you have any thoughts on if you heard the question about how these were published at the time? Yes. Can you hear me? Okay. Hold on. Hold on. We're not hearing you. The subscriptions were kind of like the original kick starters, right? Yeah. We have your sound now. Go ahead. Okay, perfect. So in addition to what each of you also thoughtfully said when I think back to the early writings of Francis Harper, that her first few writings which were short stories and poems. So remember that during this time slavery was still very much ingrained in our society. So many of her early poems and short stories were actually published in abolitionist newspapers, including The Liberator. So if we remember Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison had began abolitionist based newspapers. And this was a platform, an early platform for her were later on when many of her poems and short stories were included into text. They first started in these anti-slavery abolitionist newspapers. Thank you. And Dr. Alice just wanted me to add the imprint information for Cooper's book, which is that it was published in Xenia, I don't know, Ohio, okay, by the Aldine printing house in 1892. And again, Aldine printing house will come up again if you go over and look at the books. Yes. No, I just wanted to add to that from when I was looking at all these, I was so, I mean, I guess I should have known this, but a lot of these women did have their owners.  And part of it is that they're just support. I wouldn't say there was a lot of it, but definitely get it. Wheatley. Wheatley. I mean, they, they loved her stuff and promoted her. Right. One more question. I don't see anything in the chat. I just want to say in Brad Street when she wrote and her allegedly her brother lost all her poetry and got it published in England. One of her poems, the prologue says, it's very sarcastic, beautifully reviewed so much fun, anthologized all over the place. She said, read me. And what Cooper asked to that is listen to my voice. You know, that's so important.  Listen to who I say I am. I know better than you who I am. Read me, listen to me in my voice and even her title. She says it twice.  I know what I'm talking about. Read, listen to me. And I think that's a recurrent thing for minorities.  I have a lot of questions, but I do want people to have time to look at the books. So just a few kind of final things really quick. I've lost my page. Give me a second. I do have a link that I'm going to put in the chat and a QR code that I'm going to put up for those of you in the room to some additional resources. And also, if you are online, this will get you two images of some of the books. And for those of you in the room, it will allow you to go back to these books, find the catalog records, spend more time with them. Lorraine created a great list of additional primary source resources and some of the library's databases. So if you want to take a moment to capture this and then, yeah, please feel free to head over by the windows and the books are organized chronologically. This is Wheatley on the right here in 1773 and moving forward to almost the present day where I did bring in a few artists books by black creators who are currently really talking about some of the same things that these women were talking about in the 18th and 19th century and expressing their identities through their art and their words, their philosophies and their thinking. Thank you again so much to everyone. There is also a survey in the back of the room. If you don't mind filling that out on your way back out, we really appreciate it. Thank you all for your time and participation. One more round of applause for those of you on teams. Oh, you did it, okay. Dr. Gibbs is great. Thank you so much again. I really appreciate you coming. I do have questions for you, but I want to give people time for the book. Okay, thank you again. Hopefully you can have a follow-up conversation.


Welcome to Chris Lemlin's session. Chris wants to be a product and innovation at Liquid's Web. He's a blogger at chrislemlin.com and also winners.blog. He's a writer of various ebooks and an expert speaker. He loves telling stories to help people leverage their technology for their personal use and business. And the strategist, Chris Lemlin. Yeah! She was struggling with her website. She called me on clarity.fm and she was like, I'm having a problem. The website is slow and it's not converting. So I have a conversion problem and I'm having trouble. I said, what are you selling? She said sandpaper. I'm not sure conversion is the problem. She said no, it's sandpaper but it's sandpaper of all different kinds and I mean we have international customers from across the globe that all buy different kinds of sandpaper for different kinds of projects that they do. And we make good money out of it but we're having a big problem. And I said, so who comments that? She said yeah, I said okay. Can you give me the URL so she gives me the URL. Now if you don't know clarity, clarity.fm is a service where people call me and they pay by the minute to get advice. And I charge a decent amount of dollars per minute so everything about this has to be fast. So she gives me the URL. I type the URL into my browser. I have really good internet access. You know you go to that like speed test or something and you write it and you're like oh look, the dial's going way far so I know that it's not going to be my problem if something's slow. And normally on a call like this, silence just feels like it takes even longer. So I say, can you give me the URL? She says sure. I put it into the browser. I hit enter and we begin to wait. And we wait. And we wait. Do you know how many seconds it took to load that home page? It was 27 seconds. 27 seconds. And on a clarity call where you pay by the minute it felt like hours. And she's like what are you doing? What are you doing? Are you looking at the site? What are you doing? And I'm like just hold on a second. Still loading. Still loading. Hold on a second. I said I don't know all of your conversion problems. But I know at least one. Right? When you found that you saw the oh, I like this kind of same paper for this kind of product, right? And you clicked the category that was on the home page like this is the kind of same paper I want. You clicked. You started waiting all over again. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. You finally get the page to load. And I'm like okay here it is. All right I'm going to add it to my cart. You click a button. And you start waiting. And waiting. Here's what you should know if you don't know this already. A two second delay. A two second delay in a WooCommerce site going from one page to another. Right? An internal movement from one page to another in a WooCommerce store. A two second delay can cause a 51% decrease in session length. Now this is not going to be rocket science. But let me be clear. When does conversion happen in the course of a session? At the first half or at the second half? Right? It's the second half. For those of you that were like wondering it's the second half. If you cut session length in half you are also often cutting conversion completely out of mix. Right? If you have a two second delay going from page to page and you cut session length in half you are likely cutting conversion out of mix completely. People are just not well let's just do a quick quiz here. Right? You go to a website that is not Amazon.com. Okay? You're looking at something that you think hey this is pretty cool. You go to click to get more details and you wait three seconds. And then you click to go back or to add to your cart and you wait a few more seconds. How many of you keep plugging along and how many of you go find it on another website? How many of you keep plugging along? Right? There's three of you. You're so good. The rest of us are like no thanks. I'll just go somewhere else. Right? Here's another thing to note. And the last slide that I just showed you on the last data I showed you on the 51% decrease session length that was from a 2017 study. This was also from a 2017 study. Right? That the optimal time to wait to get to a site and have it load up is mere seconds. Mere seconds. Right? And you and in fact that special number 2.7 that's a special number because Google has decided that they're going to determine how friendly you are and if your site takes on it in 2.7 seconds to load especially if it's a store, right? They're going to decide that you don't really want customers. 2.7 is the matching number. If you are above 2.7, Google is just like no, we'll send traffic somewhere else because you're just anti-customers. Now here's the crazy thing. I run a team at Liquid Web where we have just launched a Managed to Commerce product. That is not what I'm talking here today but I will tell you that so here's what we did. We went to WooCommerce.com. You can all do this too, right? If you're going to showcase you have a whole bunch of WooCommerce stores people have submitted and said hey, check it out, I'm using WooCommerce.  Of the 562 sites 60 no longer use WooCommerce. Right? They've gone on to do something else whatever. That's not a big deal in the big scheme of things. 502 sites. 476 of them take longer than 4 seconds to load. Now you're going to go oh, this is WooCommerce's fault. Like if everybody is slow it's WooCommerce's fault. It's not. It's not WooCommerce's fault, right? There's a whole bunch of things that go into it and we have a target. We know what we want for those stores for every one of those stores and all of your stores, right? Get it down under 2.7. A third 2017 study, right? said 53% of the traffic to stores specifically was coming on mobile devices. Now here's the crazy thing about mobile devices. You won't have them, right? Everybody here have a mobile device? You likely have three things with you at any point when you leave the house. Your keys, your wallet and your mobile device. Right? So what happens when you're on a mobile device and you're looking at a store, right? Oh, I'm checking out this thing. I want to buy this thing.  If the majority of your traffic is coming to you on mobile phone and your site is slow and they get distracted you've lost the conversion there too. Does that make sense? So what I'm telling you, not shocking, right? It's not a big deal. It's not something you won't understand. Is that speed matters, right? 100 millisecond delay can hurt conversion times by 7% speed matters. What happens is you hear all the time, right? How many of you are developers? Okay, how many of you are not developers? Awesome. Let me talk to the non-developers. When you are non-developer and you talk to a developer, they're like, well, it could be fast, it could be cheap, or it could be good. Pick two. Right? And now we say, no, I want to pick all three. I want to pass. I want to cheat. And I want it good. So what we're going to do with our time today is we're going to look at stuff you can do that's fast, stuff that you can do that's cheap, and then some of the stuff that's really good that may cost you a little bit or may take some time. Does that make sense? Everyone, we're good for this? This is the verbal part where you're like, yeah! Oh, that's great. All right. So we're going to get started right away. By the way, every one of these slides is going to have one and only one point. So if you were thinking, I'm going to have to write every one of these points down, if you go to slideshare.net, slideshare.net slash C is in Chris, F is in Frank, L-E, M is in Mary, A, C-F-L-M-A, slideshare.net, slash C-F-L-M-A, this is the most recent presentation that's all there. So you don't have to do that. You don't have to write all the notes down. The other thing you can do is take your mobile phone, if you have it, point it up to the screen, take a picture, and if you want, and tweet it out to the world, and make sure that you put at Chris Lama so that everyone knows that I was the brilliant creator of this most beautiful slide. Right?  Except, do you know that the average WooCommerce site that we've seen at Liquid Web, the average WooCommerce site has over 30 plugins on their site, at least 5 of which are constantly deactive. And you're like, what's this? Now we've seen some other sites that have like 47 plugins and 12 deactive. And you're like, dear God, what are you doing? And they're like, I don't know, I didn't build it. Someone else built it for me? I gave them, I said I want all of Amazon and I want it by Saturday and I have $300. And this is what I got. And you go, yeah, okay, that lines up. I get that. So here's the thing, right? If you've bought a WooCommerce store or you've built a WooCommerce store, you may have used certain plugins to import data. You may have used certain plugins to monitor what's going on. You may have done all sorts of things that at this point you no longer need. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. The first pass, okay, we haven't used that. You can ask questions. Does anyone use this? Why is this here? I'm not joking. I have a WooCommerce customer who had three redirection plugins. Because if one is good, three is probably better. Three, you're like, this is insane. And it was because he had different people work on the site over different periods of time. He wanted to say, well, this is my favorite redirection plugin. I pulled it in and done some something there. So get rid of the ones you no longer using. That's super fast, right? Also, get rid of the ones that could just be a snippet, right? Some, it's not you. Okay, let's be clear. This is not any of you. But there are some people out there who have activated a plugin that is like, it does 45 things and they're using it to do one thing. Like, turn off the shop buttons. I just want a catalog of my website. You're like, yeah, okay. So I downloaded this super premium plugin that it controls all your WooCommerce styles and it does all these things. And then you're like, well, what are you using for? Well, I just wanted to turn off this one. And you're like, dear God, we could have done that in one line of code, right? You don't need the kitchen sink plugin to do that. I'm like, well, I didn't know. What's crazy is people will pull five plugins like that to do five different things, right? And you're like, whoa, we're going crazy here, right?  And so you can just pull these things in and go, oh, good, there it is. I don't have to use plugins to do that. Okay? I know that at every WordCamp that you've been to for five years, we have told you don't do this. Don't go get the multi-featured, super bloated theme for your website. Do you know how much impact we have had as public speakers who have been speaking at WordCamps to 300 across the country for five years in a row? You're talking about 1,500 or more events and in each of those events, two to three tracks and in each of those tracks, five to eight people speaking, you're talking about tons of people who have said stop picking your theme because it comes with 42 form plugins and 36 slider plugins and because the demo looks beautiful but it's like 900 megabytes large. We've said it over and over. Do you know how much impact we have had? Zero. That's round numbers. Zero. Zero. Because this is what we do, right? We go onto Theme Forest or we go somewhere else, someplace and we look and we go, does it look beautiful? That's cool. And what does it come with? Because I don't have to buy extra stuff. Ooh, look, it comes with everything. Great. I'll use that one. We had a client the other day who wanted to bring their site over to our stuff and it was WooCom Store. Could you take a look at it? We looked at it, 17 second page look. 17 second page look. We did one thing. We pulled off the theme and loaded up another one. A lightweight theme, which we'll talk about in a second. We just swapped the theme, right? Now, granted, it did change the layout and it didn't look a little bit. It wasn't dramatic, right? Three second look.  You have to decide that you want that multifaceted, multi-featured, come with everything, every plug-in possible. You have to want it 14 seconds so badly that you're like, yes, I understand what I'm doing and I still want it, right? And that means conversions are walking out the door, right? So you have to be really careful about what theme you're using. Does that make sense? Yeah? I know you all agree but you know what's going to happen tomorrow? You're going to go look at the theme and you're still going to do the same thing, right? Because I already know. I've been lulled into this. You're saying yes? It's not yes. Compress all your images, right? Compress all your images. It's not hard to do. There are tons of different ways you can do this. Eight or nine different plug-ins. There are things you can run on the desktop if you care about. Just take all your images and run them through. You know why? The more photographer who took the beautiful photos of those products, that photographer used a high-end digital camera. That high-end digital camera had a 24 megapixel or 42 megapixel perspective on that image and they sent it to you because that that photographer likely has been doing photography for years. And because that photographer has been doing it for years, they remember the pre-digital age where they would send it to places that would print images. So you need it. 300, 400 DPI. So they're sending you a 5 megabyte image for something you're going to put as a 300 pixel box on your screen. You don't need an image that's more than 810, 100 kP, and they're sending you 5 megabytes. You know, you're like, cool. They shared me Dropbox. Let me grab all those images and just move them to my WooCommerce store. Everything takes forever. Average website. Not even WooCommerce. Average website. Taking one, two seconds to load. More often than not, it's because the images. So compress them. You don't need them. Any larger than what you're going to actually display on your site. Does that make sense? Awesome. Now, this one is fast but controversial. Okay? Here's the thing. Your store may be unique and this may not apply. If you're the kind of store that people come to, they are regularly shoppers at your store. They come to it all the time. And they regularly log in. They love getting recommendations for themselves personally. And you are getting high conversions. This probably does not apply at all. But the majority of stores don't function that way. The majority of stores, what happens is you put all your stuff out to display and then customers just come and they take just a quick dive to look, right?  And so they get a whole bunch of links for stores that sell leather bags. They right click, open up tap, open up tap, open up tap. They got a whole bunch of tabs open. And they're going to come to your site and they're just going to peek around, look around and get out. That's the majority of your people. So you can go look at Google Analytics and be like, how many people visited my store this month? Or this week?  Then you go back and look at your, well, how many transactions? We have six. Okay, if you have 2,000 people visiting your store and six of ours, doesn't it make more sense to optimize for the 1,994 of them? Of course it does. Because if you're one of those tabs that they get, they spin up the tab that opens and the page is still loading, they just go to the next tab. I'll boot that shirt up. I'll just spend my time there. They never got to your site because it was still circling around, still loading because your site took so long to load. So what do you do? Get rid of the customized, personalized data that's sitting in the header, sitting in the footer. You might even have a sidebar that says, look, here's your shopping cart. And the reason you put your shopping cart there was because if someone added something to a cart they could get that immediate feedback that said, here's the item in your cart right there, on your site. But so few people are doing that, but now you've created a page that can't be cached in any way, shape, or form. You've done that to yourself. So get rid of some of the personalized stuff right now. Okay, your store may be unique enough that you're like, no, I can't do that. Great. Well, we'll also have the tips for you. All right. Here's one. Super easy. If your website is not running PHP 7, right? Just say yes. Right? And if you don't know if it's running PHP 7, contact your host and say, is my site running PHP 7? And they're like, oh, no, it's not right now. Great. Is there something I can do to make it happen? Yeah. We'll just make that happen. Great. Thank you very much. Hey, can you look at my database? Is it running in ODB? Right? Is that the storage engine for my database? They're like, let me look. No, it's not. Well, is that something you can do easily? Yeah. Okay. Great. These are not things you have to spend a lot of time on. You just have to know to ask. But you will dramatically speed up your store if you change how the infrastructure is working. Okay? So those are all the fast ones. Does that make sense? Yeah? We good? Have you got enough that you're like, this session is good enough that we can leave now and we don't have to worry about the rest of them? No? It's not going to. I'm trying. Okay. Let's see if this next one helps. Okay? Yeah. We talked about this already. Changing the theme is something like, wait, we tested 50 different themes for WooCommerce. 50 different themes. Ran through a whole bunch of different tests. We have 25 different performance tests that navigate through.  Right?  We ran through 25 different tests against 50 different themes. The fastest theme is a free theme called Astra. A-S-T-R-A. And you're like, are you kidding me?  But this lightweight theme and it works great with a page builder. If you're someone who likes Beaver Builder or Elementor or one of those, it works with those. Right? But you get a lightweight theme and suddenly you're like, this is amazing. We do what we do a performance challenge where we invite you to migrate your store temporarily. Just a copy of the site over to our servers and we'll put it on our managed WordPress Management Commerce offering a bunch of different optimizations on our platform. And then we'll show you what the speed was over there what the speed is over here and the difference. And then we do this one last extra thing where we get rid of your theme and put in Astra and just go, look, we're not saying you have to do this but this is how awesome it helped, right?  And every time it comes back to well, your theme was written by someone who cared about how it looked. Not necessarily cared about how it performed. Now there's nothing wrong with the look. I mean, honest to God, that's what we wanted themes to be. Themes of the things that make your site look the way they look. So the people who are working on making themes look the way they look, they're good people. But just because you're good at designing something that looks good doesn't mean you're good at making sure it performs well. And performs well in the context of e-commerce. So what you want to do is look for a theme that's lightweight and performs well. Now, storefront is another one that the guys at e-commerce have rolled out, the people there. And it's free too. Again, you can pay to get child themes, you can pay to get extra allowance. But there are several themes that are super lightweight. Evaluate that for yourself. Does that make sense? This one is cheap. It's not free, but it's cheap. You can hire. You can go to codable.io and you can hire someone. You can call your host. You may have to pay a little search rubs depending on who the host is. But you can ask someone to look at your database. And we're looking for orphans. Now orphans are not these are not people. These are things that were left in your database when you deactivated a plugin, stopped using a theme, changed how you were doing something and they just sat there. You have tables that are sitting there. You may have external calls or transits. There's all sorts of things you could have sitting there that you don't want to need. And you go, yeah, but I'm not using it, so what does it matter? Your database as a whole is storing things in a predefined set of tables. Database tables are the places where we store things. If you have extra entries in that table that you don't need every time we do a query at the data from those tables that we do need we have to go through all the other stuff you don't.  They're all going to be up here. They're not going to get a mic because only Chris gets the mic because this conversation is who commerce, but the rest of them can be up here and they're just going to be talking. Just ignore them. And you're like, well, I can kind of ignore them, but it's annoying. And it's hard to hear all the time and sometimes I miss a word. Well, that's what's happening in your database. You've loaded up with other stuff that doesn't belong there and it's hard to get at the rest of the stuff that you do care about. So hire someone to go in and clean it up and they'll just go, okay, it's not a big job, right? Just go in and you're like, okay, I see that you have these tables here. No one are needed. I see you have these entries here. No one are needed. Clean it out. Does that make sense? Now, WooCommerce has a whole bunch of super cool features and because those features are super awesome, they require scripts that have to be in your site to actually be able to do things, right? This is fantastic. Everything about how WooCommerce was designed for this lets you be super flexible. That's their point, their ability to let you do what you want to do. But with great power comes great responsibility.  Other people aren't very responsible, right? So what happens? You have your theme or your code or another plugin that is actually spinning up additional input calls or JavaScript calls or prepping for shortcuts that will never materialize on a page because you have already determined you're not going to put a shortcode there. So why do you want those Woo functions running on those pages? We love JavaScript, right? We love JavaScript. You learn it deeply and JavaScript was this thing that you was like oh it's so cool because it's asynchronous, right? It's just going to go off and do its own call. You know what happens with JavaScript is that first you have to connect to whatever server has the JavaScript. Then you have to pull it down. Then your processor has to go figure out what's in it and what we have to do with it. And all of that takes time and we're talking about speed and performance every second every 100 milliseconds count so if you have 3, 4 or 27 additional calls and you're pulling files down and then you're waiting for them to come all the way down and then you're processing them figuring out what you're compiling and what you're going to use. All for a page that has no shortcode in it you just threw away an extra second and a half, two seconds for no good reason. So limit root functions on non-root pages. Now, there is a super cool plugin called the query monitor plugin. This is one of those that you're going to want to install, use, and then de-install. You have to wait and get off because you don't want to leave plugins sitting around doing nothing but this is super cool because what it will do is it will actually show you the queries that are being run on your pages and you're going wait, what's a query? Everything about your store, everything about WooCommerce, everything about WordPress is fundamentally stored if it's not in a plugin file if it's not an image, it's stored in the database and in order to get the data from the database back to the engine to the PHP, the processor, brings it out to you all of it has to go back to a database unless it's cached, you're hitting a database. So think about it as the long distance call to your grandma. You have a long distance call, you have to make that call. Now, how much does it cost to make the call? It depends on where your grandma's at. And query monitor tells you, oh my grandmother, for the longest time was in South America, in Chile. We can only call her certain times of the day when the price was right. Right? This thing tells you the price of every one of those calls this thing tells you literally, here is exactly how many calls that plugin's making how many calls that plugin's making how many calls that page or that post or that plugin it's telling you that so that you can look at it and go, wait a minute I barely use that plugin. Why is it making a hundred queries? Right? And you can start asking yourself very special questions about I love my grandma, right? But I remember asking my mom hey, how come we don't call her when we come after school like we call the other grandma that happened to be here in California? I said we love her, we just don't love her that much. She was not my mom's mom, she was my dad's mom. All right. Dashboard, right? You log in to a WooCommerce store and you get the dashboard.  You get all that stuff in the admin sign and you get all that stuff in the dashboard and every one of those screens is making calls for the database, more queries and every time you make calls for those things you're impacting the performance of your production store customers. Does that make sense? Every call you make to the database for yourself is slowing down the performance of what your customer's experience on the store. So you can have a tremendous impact on your store simply by what you're looking at. And here's the crazy part. You can also have a tremendous impact on the performance of your store at things you're not looking at. How many of you spend a lot of time on the dashboard even if you're not running a WooCommerce store looking at everything that comes on your dashboard? How many of you are like, oh my god I love this dashboard and I spend a lot of time looking at all this stuff? Yeah, there's always one in the crowd. The reality is there's a whole bunch of queries that are running on that page on the dashboard that you don't ever look at. And there are columns. When you go to the product page, there are columns that they have to literally go to the database to go pull so that they can show you the price of the products or the orders or anything else that you're pulling queries and you and I even care. So start turning those things off. Take those things off the dashboard, turn off columns in the admin pages that you don't specifically need and limit the amount of calls you're making that impact your customer's side. Does that make sense? Awesome. And you're probably going, okay but hold on a second. How are we going to do that? I'm going to show you how to do that in just a second. Now we're here at that second. github.com lukecalf slash code dash snippets dash WP dash speed dash up. If you go to that URL Luke is a guy that works for us at the web and he has a ridiculous quantity of code snippets that just do different things and the beautiful things you're like, yeah but I don't read code. No, but you can read the title of the snippet. And the title of the snippet is stuff that's not imaginative. It says stuff like turn off the woo orders widget in the dashboard. And you go, great I'm not looking at the dashboard for orders. So yes, let me take that one and let me put it in my code snippets plugin and activate it. And the code snippets plugin lets you say activate this only on admin or activate it on the whole side or activate it just on the front end of the customers. And you're like, oh that's an admin one so let's just run it in admin. And you go, great that code snippet will turn that off. And there's a whole bunch more in there. And you can go, that's good let's try that.  But there's a whole bunch here to look at. Does that make sense? Those were all the cheap ones. Let's talk about spending some money. Change your host. Change your host. You're like wait a second don't you work at a host? Yep and I would tell you the same thing if you work with us right now if you're a customer of ours right now I would still tell you regularly evaluate your host. Do you know why? Every single hosting company in the world whether they own their own data center like we do or not whether you're sitting as a host is sitting on someone else's data center at the end of the day there is always a server right? Could be containers which sit on top of resource whatever but there is a computing resource and it turns out nobody gives you those for free. Someone has to make a capital investment so what happens? The people who make the most recent capital investment will have faster equipment than the people who are trying to milk another year out of the capital investment they made 5 years ago. So it doesn't matter which host you're talking about whether you're talking about GoDaddy or the GoWeb. At some point they had to put an expense and if they are not owning their own data center they're paying someone else that person has to pay for the expense and then that company is going to pass along that dynamic to them.  But test it, take your stuff put it somewhere else, run through some tests and decide if you want to go there or not but you should do this regularly probably every 18 months to 24 months you should evaluate all the hosts all over again for serious performance you go oh, okay this one's faster, now this one's faster you don't have to have tremendous loyalty to OOs you have to have tremendous loyalty to that performance of that store because that's what drives conversions okay, now there are as much as I say get rid of these plugins and don't use big plugins and bloated plugins there are a couple plugins we found