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Lecture

Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England with Dr. Jared Hardesty

WSP · Jan 3, 2022 ·

The local initiative, Slavery in Guilford: Witness to History, will present a webinar with Dr. Jared Hardesty.

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area’s indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region’s economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told.

In this talk, Jared Hardesty will discuss his book, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds, focusing on how and why he wrote the book. He also will explore the lives of enslaved people in New England and larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution.

Jared Ross Hardesty is associate professor of history at Western Washington University and a scholar of colonial America, the Atlantic world, and the histories of labor and slavery. He is the author of Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: NYU Press, 2016), which explores the relationship between slavery and other forms of dependence in eighteenth-century Boston, and Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Amherst & Boston: Bright Leaf, 2019).

This program will be presented as a webinar and registration is required.

Click here to register.

Witness Stones Project Presented by the Branford Historical Society

WSP · Nov 10, 2021 ·

The Branford Historical Society welcomed the Witness Stones Project on November 10, 2021. We invite you to watch the lecture here:

Enslaved Wallingford: The Missing Chapter of our American Narrative

WSP · Nov 5, 2021 ·

Yale University & the Politics of Slavery

WSP · Nov 4, 2021 ·

Witness Stones Project affiliate Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford presented the webinar “Yale University & the Politics of Slavery” on November 4, 2021

The talk was given by Bennett Parten, a doctoral candidate and a member of the Yale and Slavery Group which the institution’s president created and charged with studying the University’s history.

Race, Slavery, and Yale’s Construction of Its Memory

WSP · Oct 30, 2021 ·

In October 2021, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University hosted its 23rd annual conference, Yale & Slavery in Historical Perspective. During the concluding roundtable, Adrienne Joy Burns, Physician Assistant at Smilow Cancer Center and member of the Amistad Committee, discussed how the Witness Stones Project and other educational efforts can help universities and communities confront their history.

Yale University and the Politics of Slavery

WSP · Oct 26, 2021 ·

 

“Yale University & the Politics of Slavery” is the next talk in the webinar series co-sponsored by Guilford’s Witness Stones Project Affiliate Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford.

The talk will be given by Bennett Parten, a doctoral candidate and a member of the Yale and Slavery Group which the institution’s president created and charged with studying the University’s history.

“As an American institution that is 319 years old,” President Peter Salovey wrote on creating the task force, “Yale has a complex past that includes associations, many of them formative, with individuals who actively promoted slavery, anti-Black racism, and other forms of exploitation. We have a responsibility to explore this history, including its most difficult aspects; we cannot ignore our institution’s own ties to slavery and racism, and we should take this opportunity to research, understand, analyze, and communicate that history.”

In his talk, Mr. Parten will discuss the university’s relationship to slavery and abolitionism, and show how campus debate evolved in the lead-up to the Civil War. His interests include the histories of race, slavery, abolition, and emancipation.

Registration is required to join this webinar.

Click here to register for this online lecture.

Religion, Race and Slavery in Colonial New England with Dr. Ken Minkema

WSP · Oct 5, 2021 ·

Local Witness Stones Project affiliate Witness to History presented this lecture at the Guilford Free Library.

Religion, Race, and Slavery in Colonial New England

WSP · Sep 16, 2021 ·

 

REGISTER HERE

Let’s Not Fight the Civil War Again

WSP · Jun 30, 2021 ·

Witness Stones Project Co-Chair Pat Wilson Pheanious. Photo by Lester Smith.

By Jackie Hemond in the Suffield Observer on June 30, 2021

 

In June, I witnessed an amazing dialogue. For two days, the Phelps-Hatheway House hosted two programs, both featuring Joe McGill, a national figure and founder of the Slave Dwelling Project. The hook for the Project is ingenious. McGill sleeps in slave quarters for a night. He has done this at 150 sites in 25 states so far. He does not review how comfortable a slave bed is. The point of his sleepovers is threefold: to preserve former slave dwellings; lift slavery from the footnotes of history; and engage his audience in a thoughtful, non-combative discussion about slavery, racism, race relations and racial equity.

We were engaged! So engaged that both programs ran overtime. The second day was a panel discussion when McGill was flanked by Dennis Culliton, Founder and Executive Director of the Witness Stones Project and Pat Wilson Pheanious, Co-Chair of the Witness Stones Project. Suffield will soon be placing a witness stone for Tamer, an enslaved woman, purchased “as a slave for life” when she was seven by Luther Loomis who lived at the corner of Bridge and Main Streets. Continue reading.

Oral History and the African American Experience

WSP · May 13, 2021 ·

 

Hear Tamara Lanier explain how buying a salad at an ice cream store and a promise to her dying mother led to discovering that Harvard University possessed images of her enslaved great, great, great grandfather, Renty Taylor, and his daughter, Delia. Learn how oral history, research and luck led to that discovery and how that discovery has led to a landmark lawsuit against Harvard over who owns the record of past injustices and whether past injustices are relevant in determining ownership.

Presented by local Guilford affiliate Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford and the Guilford Free Library. Please click here for more details.

Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford seeks to uncover the history of slavery in our town, examine its legacy, and share what we learn.

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