We are excited to announce that we are co-organizing a webinar, together with The Netherland-America Foundation (NAF) on 3 October 2024!
After the American Revolution, a small town in what is now New York City opened a preparatory academy. In this webinar, organized for both Dutch and American audiences, MIT Professor Craig Wilder will discuss how the residents of this Dutch farming village used the slave economy and the early national desire for schools to recover from several years of warfare and military occupation. His talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by slavery scholar Damian Pargas.
The event will take place online at 12:00 ET/18:00 CET.
Presenter:
Craig Steven Wilder is the Barton L. Weller Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury, 2013). Since its publication, scores of colleges and universities have publicly acknowledged their historical ties to slavery and the slave trade. He is also the author of In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City; and A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn. Professor Wilder is a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he has served as a visiting professor, commencement speaker, and academic advisor. For two decades, BPI has given hundreds of men and women the opportunity to earn college degrees during their incarcerations in the New York State prison system.
Moderator:
Damian Pargas is Professor of North American History & Culture at Leiden University in the Netherlands, as well as the Director of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies. Specialized in the history of slavery and its aftermath, he is the author or editor of seven books and numerous articles on various aspects of slavery, including The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South (University Press of Florida, 2010), Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
