Hosted by the Slave Legacy History Coalition
With Dr. Seth Rockman
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 | 10:30-11:30 AM EST
Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/
Meeting ID: 847 6338 5655 Passcode: 294088
In this talk, Rockman tells the biggest stories of early American history through the most mundane artifacts: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear. In following these goods from the communities in which they were made to the communities in which they were used, Rockman rethinks the geography of slavery and freedom in the decades between American independence and the Civil War. He poses questions that continue to preoccupy us in the age of the iPhone and fair-trade coffee: what are the moral, ecological, and political relationships linking consumers and producers across long distances? What does it mean to be “complicit”?
Seth Rockman is an associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
SLAVE LEGACY HISTORY COALITION
A JOURNEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY
“A PLATFORM CONNECTING THE SPOKES ON THE WHEEL OF HISTORY OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE AND DESCENDANTS”
The Slave Legacy History Coalition is a consortium of individuals, organizations, and institutions engaged in the preservation of the history of enslaved people in the Cambridge, Boston communities and beyond. The Slave Legacy History Coalition was established in the fall of 2021 by the Lloyd Family descendants of Tony, Cuba, and Darby, whose enslaver Issac Royall Jr. endowed the first law professorships at Harvard University, which eventually became Harvard Law School. The Slave Legacy History Coalition was established to build a pathway forward for other families who are descendants of slaves and also the general public to help connect to the vast repositories of information on slave legacy history in the Boston and Cambridge communities and beyond. The mission of the Slave Legacy
History Coalition is to provide easier access to information and resources on the legacy of slavery before and after emancipation for the families of slave descendants and the general public. Copyright 2022 -2024 Lloyd Family Trust
The presentations represent the view of the speakers and not necessarily that of the Slave Legacy History Coalition.
