Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery with Professor Seth Rockman

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

Please join the McDonough School of Business and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies for a book talk by Professor Seth Rockman (Brown University).

Thursday, November 14, 1-2pm, Fisher Colloquium, 4th Floor, Hariri Building

Please register to attend this event here.

The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.