Day 3 – Slavery in New England:  Part I.

Teachers will hear lectures on the use of enslaved Indian and African labor in colonial New England to produce agricultural and manufactured products for the slave trade, the provisioning trades, and local consumption, and on the everyday lives of slaves. Margaret Newell, Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University and author of the forthcoming “The Drove of Adam’s Seed”: Indian Slavery in Colonial New England, will present “Indian Enslavement in New England,” a lecture on the first enslaved laborers in New England, who were native peoples sold into slavery following the seventeenth-century Pequot and King Philip’s Wars. Then Keith Stokes, a local African-American history specialist, will talk to the group on the uses of African and Afro-Indian enslaved labor in colonial New England and the everyday lives of slaves in a variety of New England settings in his lecture, “ ‘Servants,’ Craftsmen, and Laborers.” In the afternoon, teachers will be driven to Newport, Rhode Island, where they will go on a Slavery Walking Tour conducted by Theresa Stokes, a specialist in the history of slavery in Newport for the Newport Historical Society. 

Day 4 – Slavery in New England:  Part II.

First, teachers will tour the John Brown House Museum, home of merchant, slave owner, and slave trader John Brown. Teachers will spend the second half of the morning in the Rhode Island Historical Society Library, where they will be introduced to its rich archival resources. Under the guidance of the co-directors, institute staff, and archivists, they will learn how to use the finding aids and resources of a research library to find primary documents related to the slave trade, the West Indies trade, and native and African enslavement.  In the afternoon, Dr. Grefe and Dr. Melish will conduct a series of pedagogical exercises using The Narrative of Venture Smith and the documents the teachers have located to introduce strategies of reading primary sources that will allow students to understand them and assess their value as evidence.