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Event Series: Celebrating America’s 250th

The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery

May 16 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

$10.00 – $20.00

Saturday morning: Ticket sales have closed but there is room for walk-ins.

A conversation with historian John Harpham about his new book, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, hailed as a “landmark account of the origins of American slavery showing how ancient Roman ideas were used to defend the establishment of a slave empire in the English Atlantic world.”

On our 250th anniversary, Harpham’s deep, original research helps answer the paradox of our nation’s original sin. We’re thrilled that John is taking time off from his book tour of major American and British cities to stop in Sandisfield. 

Books will be available for purchase and signing by the author.

The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery published by Harvard University Press has been widely praised:

An outstanding accomplishment in intellectual history. With bracing clarity and moral force, John Harpham recovers a forgotten landscape of thought that rendered slavery not only conceivable but also morally permissible in the English-speaking world. Like David Brion Davis before him, Harpham writes with both scholarly precision and humanistic urgency. Luminous and unsettling, this is a foundational text for anyone who seeks to understand the origins of Anglo-American slavery.

—Orlando Patterson, author of Enslavement: Past and Present

Searing, unsettling, and strikingly original, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery is the most ambitious account of slavery’s founding in the New World since the work of David Brion Davis half a century ago. With unflinching acuity and relying on breathtaking research, Harpham recounts the terrible story of how the English in America convinced themselves of the rightness of human bondage.

—Jill Lepore, author of We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

Compelled by the desire to understand how human beings come to defend the indefensible, John Harpham turns to the early modern roots of Atlantic slavery in this perceptive intellectual history. The depth of his research and the boldness of his insights are certain to command attention.

—Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Harpham is Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Professor in the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma.  His research examines ideas about slavery, freedom, and race, as well as the relation of such ideas to practices of enslavement and resistance across the Atlantic world. He is at work on a three-volume series about the ideas associated with the origins, development, and eventual abolition of slavery in the Anglo-American Atlantic world.

About Community tickets: We make available a limited number of Community tickets @ $10. (on a first come, first served basis) to make our events affordable for more members of the community. Honor system, no proof required.  

 

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Details

Date:
May 16
Time:
10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Cost:
$10.00 – $20.00
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