Name: Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
Start: 2025-10-09T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-10-09T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Carpenter Museum

In this talk author and educator Seth Rockman tells the biggest stories of early American history through the most mundane artifacts.
About this Event

Join the Carpenter Museum for Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery at 6:30 on October 9th. This talk is in conjunction with the Carpenter Museum's newest Exhibit “Woven Histories: The Art and Labor of Early American Textiles”. In this talk, Seth 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"?

This event is free and open to the public.

About Seth Rockman:

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.

The lecture will start at 6:30PM. Registration is encouraged.The event will be held in the Tilton Room at the Carpenter Museum, 4 Locust Avenue. Parking can be found in the back lot behind the museum off of Bay State Road.

If you have quesitons email [email protected] or call us at 508-252-3031.

Parking can be found in the back lot behind the museum off of Bay State Road.

This event is sponsored by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.