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The Rhode Island Historical Society will host historian Seth Rockman for a talk on his latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, on Thursday, December 5th at 6:00 pm at the Aldrich House in Providence. Plantation Goods tells the biggest stories of early American history through the most mundane artifacts: woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear, for example, or shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi. Following these goods from the communities in which they were made to the communities in which they were used, Plantation Goods rethinks the geography of slavery and freedom in the decades between American independence and the Civil War. The book 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”?
Attendance for the talk is free, but registration is required. Tickets are available here.
Seth Rockman is an associate professor of 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.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Nelson W. Aldrich House, 110 Benevolent St,Providence,RI,United States
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