Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been postponed. Please stay tuned for a new date and time for the re-scheduled event.
In commemoration of Women’s History Month, please join The Forum and the Lehman Center for American History for an important discussion of the 2020 History Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America". The panel will feature the book’s author, Prof. Caleb McDaniel of Rice University and two interlocutors from Columbia, the Center for Justice’s Greer Ellis and History Professor Stephanie McCurry, moderated by Assoc. Prof. Hilary Hallett of the History Department and co-Director of the Lehman Center. There will be a Q & A session following the discussion for viewers to submit questions for the speakers.
"Sweet Taste of Liberty" investigates the life of Henrietta Wood, an enslaved woman freed in 1848 but violently abducted back into slavery in 1853. Her experiences of losing the sweet taste of liberty – but fighting to regain it in 1870 and ultimately hold her kidnapper legally responsible for restitution – are an important and inspiring story for us in 2021.
As Prof. McDaniel shares with us in this remarkable feat of research and writing: “Slavery concealed many of the things that historians most want to know about enslaved people: their experiences, their feelings, their family histories …. Nineteenth century records about black women in particular faced an uphill battle for survival in the archives. … the archive of slavery we have is itself an artifact of slaveholders’ power and violence in the past. … Denying a past to enslaved people was not incidental to slavery, but essential to the whole system of dispossession and domination.”
"Sweet Taste of Liberty" is available for purchase here:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sweet-taste-of-liberty-9780197564288?lang=en&cc=ca
This special event is co-sponsored by The Lehman Center for American History, a collaboration between the Department of History and Columbia University Libraries, and The Forum, a program of the Office of the President at Columbia University. Visit the Forum's webpage here: https://theforum.columbia.edu/liberty
