Slavery History / Studies

Living in a Material World

APRIL 2023 NEWSLETTER

A monthly roundup of what we’re reading this month – or listening to – in the world of material culture, alongside any updates from our editorial board.

What we’ve been reading

Carly Ciufo:

When on fieldwork in Liverpool in 2019, multiple educators that I spoke to at the International Slavery Museum (ISM) proudly discussed a stamp of abolitionist Harriet Tubman that was archived in both their handling and permanent collections. Created by artist Dano Wall when the Tubman revision to the $20USD banknote was halted, it stamps Tubman’s image over

Chris J. Gismondi,

McGill University

Slavery in North America conjures up images of West Indies plantations or the American south, but its presence in northern sites is noteworthy and under examined. This amnesia is despite Rhode Island’s role as a major hub of the slave trade by the mid-eighteenth century. Figures like Sue fleeing James Clark in Niagara, laboured, toiled, and resisted systems of slavery without cash crops, but served and provided for enslavers in cold, isolated, frontier settlements. Although various regions from Mexico to Canada at different times enslaved both Indigenous

Dear H-Slavery Members,

I am excited to introduce Legacies, H-Slavery's new blog on slavery and public history. More than 400 years after a slave ship brought the first enslaved Africans to colonial Virginia in 1619, more than 155 years after slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, the history of slavery -- and how it is remembered in the public imagination -- remains a subject of controversy and contention, a flashpoint in ongoing culture wars. Sharing research about slavery and exploring innovative ways that scholars present their work to the public is as relevant and important as