About this Event
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"?
Speaker Bio:
Seth Rockman is the George L. Littlefield Professor of American 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. Plantation Goods was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the Mark Lynton History Prize. The book was also named the winner of the Philip Taft Labor History Award.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation, 154 Moody Street, Waltham, United States
USD 0.00
