slavery Archives

By Editor April 29, 2024

J.E. Morgan

J.E. Morgan, 2023-2024 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow J.E. Morgan is a historian of gender, race, and sexuality and the intersections of culture and law in the Anglo-Atlantic of the long eighteenth century. Dr. Morgan completed her doctorate in history at Emory University in 2021 and has received research support from the Cromwell Foundation and American Legal Society and the McNeil… Read More

fellowships 2 min read

By Editor April 04, 2024

“Communal Biography: Reflections on Centering Stories of the Enslaved”

Join the Omohundro Institute as we welcome OI author and former Council member Sara E. Johnson for the 10th annual Council Lecture. Professor Johnson (University of California, San Diego) will deliver “Communal Biography: Reflections on Centering Stories of the Enslaved.” Communal biography offers new ways to think about the past inside and outside of the archive. Moving between… Read More

3 min read

By Editor February 23, 2024

OI Author Conversation with Sara E. Johnson and Ada Ferrer

Join OI author Sara E. Johnson in conversation with Ada Ferrer ONLINE as they discuss Johnson’s new book, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Johnson and Ferrer will discuss experimental writing methods in historiography, the idea of communal biography, and stories about the enslaved and free… Read More

3 min read

By Editor October 20, 2023

Colloq with Simon Newman

Join us on Tuesday, April 16, 2024 at 5:00 pm in the Cox classroom of the Reeder Media Center, lower level of Swem Library, as we welcome Simon Newman. Professor Newman will discuss “Taken Not Given: the end of slavery in Britain.” England’s Somerset v Stewart (1772) and Scotland’s Knight v Wedderburn (1778) have often been interpreted as ending… Read More

3 min read

By Editor July 28, 2023

WMQ Lecture with Vanessa Holden

Join us on Thursday, February 23, 2023, at 5:00 pm in room Tidewater B of the Sadler Center on the campus of William & Mary, for a talk by scholar Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky) titled “Survival and Resistance: African American Women in Nat Turner’s Community.” Vanessa Holden is an associate professor of History at the University of Kentucky and director of the Central Kentucky… Read More

2 min read

By Editor July 28, 2023

Colloquium with Nicole Dressler

Join us in the OI Conference room, Swem Library, campus of William & Mary, for a discussion of “‘not to suffer him to be made subject to personal Slavery and Bondage’: Black Convict Transportation and Servitude in the British Atlantic World.” Nicole Dressler is a Senior Lecturer in History at William & Mary. Before coming to William… Read More

3 min read

By OI December 02, 2022

"Transforming Waste into Wealth: The Political Economy of Alcohol in the Leeward Islands, 1670-1737"

OI Colloquium with Lila O’Leary Chambers Alcohol played a crucial role in supporting the Leeward Islands’ transition from a “society with slaves” to an entrenched “slave society” across the early eighteenth century. Rather than acting solely as a signifier of planter excess, this chapter reveals that white settlers and enslaved and free African and African-descended peoples incorporated it in… Read More

4 min read

By OI December 02, 2022

“‘They brought them from the Palenque’: Captivity and Smuggling in Jamaica, ca. 1660”

OI Colloquium with Casey Schmitt Following the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, Spanish forces maintained a toehold on the island over five years of guerilla warfare in large part because of the food and shelter they received from three different semi-autonomous Afro-Jamaican communities on the island. While historians discuss two of the three Afro-Jamaican villages, they also often… Read More

4 min read

By OI December 02, 2022

Vast Early America at the Washington History Seminar

Join OI author Robert G. Parkinson for an OI-sponsored session of the National History Center’s Washington History Seminar. Usually convened in person at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, the event will take place online. On December 20, 2021, a roundtable on Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence will take place with… Read More

2 min read

By OI December 02, 2022

"Drivers in Revolt: Slavery, Leadership, and the Berbice Conspiracy of 1814"

OI Colloquium with Randy Browne This paper is part of a broader book project about the role of enslaved drivers on British Caribbean plantations. Here, Browne uses the voluminous documentation of a rebellious conspiracy in Berbice (part of what is now Guyana) and focuses on the crucial role of drivers. Some drivers were leaders of the African “nations” that… Read More

3 min read

By OI December 02, 2022

"Marriage, Motherhood, Slaveholding: Isabella Graham in North America, 1767-1772"

OI Colloquium with Amanda Moniz The future philanthropist Isabella Graham was a still-new wife and young mother when she arrived in North America in 1768 with her husband, a British Army physician. She would spend the next several years in Montreal and Fort Niagara, establishing a family, adjusting to unfamiliar environments, and becoming an enslaver. Exploring experiences that would… Read More

3 min read

By OI December 02, 2022

Jennifer L. Morgan talks to Jessica Marie Johnson about Wicked Flesh

WATCH HERE Join the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture (OI) and the Center for Black Visual Culture & Institute of African American Affairs (CBVC) at New York University, in partnership with the NYU Center for the Humanities, online for two conversations featuring Jennifer L. Morgan (New York University) and Jessica Marie… Read More

11 min read

J.E. Morgan

“Communal Biography: Reflections on Centering Stories of the Enslaved”

OI Author Conversation with Sara E. Johnson and Ada Ferrer

Colloq with Simon Newman

WMQ Lecture with Vanessa Holden

Colloquium with Nicole Dressler

"Transforming Waste into Wealth: The Political Economy of Alcohol in the Leeward Islands, 1670-1737"

“‘They brought them from the Palenque’: Captivity and Smuggling in Jamaica, ca. 1660”

Vast Early America at the Washington History Seminar

"Drivers in Revolt: Slavery, Leadership, and the Berbice Conspiracy of 1814"

"Marriage, Motherhood, Slaveholding: Isabella Graham in North America, 1767-1772"

Jennifer L. Morgan talks to Jessica Marie Johnson about Wicked Flesh

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J.E. Morgan

“Communal Biography: Reflections on Centering Stories of the Enslaved”

OI Author Conversation with Sara E. Johnson and Ada Ferrer

Colloq with Simon Newman

WMQ Lecture with Vanessa Holden

Colloquium with Nicole Dressler

"Transforming Waste into Wealth: The Political Economy of Alcohol in the Leeward Islands, 1670-1737"

“‘They brought them from the Palenque’: Captivity and Smuggling in Jamaica, ca. 1660”

Vast Early America at the Washington History Seminar

"Drivers in Revolt: Slavery, Leadership, and the Berbice Conspiracy of 1814"

"Marriage, Motherhood, Slaveholding: Isabella Graham in North America, 1767-1772"

Jennifer L. Morgan talks to Jessica Marie Johnson about Wicked Flesh

Recent Posts

A Folder of One’s Own: Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin’s Life in Poetry

J.E. Morgan

Noel Edward Smyth

Subscribe to the Blog

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