Day 4: Sunday 9th June 2024 – Celebration Day – Walk – Manchester’s ‘American Connections’
A tour of Manchester's cultural ties with America. Including notable Americans who visited from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries, Benjamin Franklin, Malcolm X, and more!
1.30pm – 4pm (appx): Manchester’s ‘American Connections’ Historical Walking Tour Start: Lincoln Square, Brazennose Street, Manchester M2 5LN
End: University of Manchester (appx 4km)
The ‘American Connections’ walking tour aims to offer a fresh cultural remapping of
Manchester.
FREE.
Let us know if you are coming. Book HERE:
The tour, led by Dr. Andrew Fearnley and UG students from American Studies, foregrounds a gallery of around twenty prominent or influential Americans who visited the city between the late-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, including the intellectual and diplomat Benjamin Franklin; abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond; musicians from the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Paul Robeson and Bob Dylan; popular entertainment shows including Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Tour, and the Chicago White Sox; and civil rights leaders such as WEB Du Bois and Malcolm X.
These figures were led here by diverse cause, their stays of variable length, and what they remembered about their time mixed. Collectively such troubadours, and the locations where they spoke, sang, or stayed, frame a period when Manchester’s connections to the US were densest.
The tour will last about 2.5 hours (including a brief stop for refreshments) and cover around 4km of the city centre. It starts at Lincoln Square, before proceeding to St Ann’s Square, the Town Hall, St. Peter’s Square, and then along Oxford Road ending up at The University of Manchester to catch Manchester Histories Festival events.
As well as emphasizing the overlapping, sometimes surprising, and relational nature of these transatlantic connections, the tour will offer new ways to contemplate Manchester’s place in wider patterns of trade, political debate, and cultural exchange.
