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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
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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
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By OI December 02, 2022

Jessica Marie Johnson talks to Jennifer L. Morgan about Reckoning with Slavery

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
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By OI December 01, 2022

“Asserting Pregnancy in a Colonial Prison: Resounding Silences in Cecilia’s Record”

In 1784, Cecilia Conway—a maroon woman arrested in New Orleans—asserted that she was pregnant, thereby altering the trajectory of the state-sanctioned sexual violence and capital punishment inflicted upon her in response to her marronage. Cecilia was imprisoned at the height of a Spanish campaign against communities of cimarrones living outside New Orleans. The exchanges between officials and Cecilia noted by the men… Read More

3 min read
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By OI December 01, 2022

“A Curious List and a Trip to Sierra Leone:' Or, Why Obour Tanner Bought Rev. Hopkins' The System of Doctrines in 1793?”

OI Colloquium with Tara Bynum “‘A Curious List and a Trip to Sierra Leone:’ Or, Why Obour Tanner Bought Rev. Hopkins’ The System of Doctrines in 1793” takes a look at an oddly placed list of subscribers. It’s among the subscribers to Hopkins’s System of Doctrines, and its title is “Free Blacks.”  While it might be easy to ignore the curious… Read More

3 min read
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By Karen B. Graubart August 11, 2021

Seeing with Others

How an intellectual collaboration brought four lives into focus By Karen B. Graubart This article began with a generous hand-off from a friend and colleague. Luis Miguel Glave, an eminent Peruvian scholar and regular denizen of the reading room of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, enjoys taking a morning break from research with other scholars gathered from… Read More

WMQ 8 min read
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By Janine Yorimoto Boldt August 31, 2020

Jack Custis, Race, and the Unseen in Colonial Virginia Portraits

by Janine Yorimoto Boldt One painfully obvious fact as one scrolls through Colonial Virginia Portraits is that the faces are overwhelmingly white. Colonial Virginia Portraits includes more than 500 recorded portraits of which approximately 95 are documented but no longer extant. Only four of the total represent a non-white person. Three of these feature unnamed individuals who are… Read More

digital projects 13 min read
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By M. Scott Heerman June 18, 2020

Tracking "Slavery in Motion"

by M. Scott Heerman In this post, WMQ author M. Scott Heerman discusses what he would have done with a larger word limit for his article, “Abolishing Slavery in Motion: Foreign Captivity and International Abolitionism in the Early United States,” in the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free on the OI… Read More

WMQ 8 min read
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By Jenny Shaw June 10, 2020

Finding Susannah Mingo

In this post, WMQ author Jenny Shaw recounts how she came to research and write the story of Susannah Mingo for the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free on the OI Reader. We will close the beta period of the OI Reader on October 1. After that, all… Read More

WMQ 9 min read
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By Karin Wulf March 17, 2020

The New York Times 1619 Project and the Omohundro Institute

By Karin Wulf The 1619 Project continues to attract a lot of readers and responses.  On March 6 the editor of the New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, and the principal author of the New York Times 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, convened scholars at the Times Center for a conversation centered on one of the issues that has been most provocative:  slavery and American Revolution.  I… Read More

#VastEarlyAmerica 11 min read
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By oieahc August 06, 2019

1619 and Virginia

This post accompanies “Virginia, 1619,” episode 250 of Ben Franklin’s World. In this week’s special episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Liz Covart talks with Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Norfolk State University and an expert in African-American and American history, about the lasting impact of the events of 1619… Read More

Ben Franklin's World 3 min read
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By Emily West May 07, 2019

The Double-Edged Sword of Motherhood Under American Slavery

H.E. Hayward and Slave Nurse Louisa, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. This post accompanies “Motherhood in Early America,” episode 237 of Ben Franklin’s World. by Emily West Mother’s Day offers opportunities to reflect upon motherhood in relation to ethnicity and class. Racial discrimination and poverty mean that a narrow conceptualization of biological motherhood associated with domestic care and nurture is not applicable to all in the past or present. This is especially true when considering the lives of enslaved women, for whom motherhood was a double-edged sword and many of whom endured a complex relationship with mothering. Women knew that their babies held pecuniary value to slaveholders and that they might be forcibly separated from their offspring at any time. Maternal love for children therefore co-existed alongside more ambivalent attitudes towards motherhood among enslaved women who rightly feared that their children might be wrenched away or otherwise fail to survive under the slave regime. Read More

Ben Franklin's World 14 min read
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