VIRTUAL PROGRAM: The Role Of The Press In Perpetuating Slavery

Join Professor Carl Robert Keyes for a stunning exploration of “The Slavery Adverts 250 Project,” which chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses. The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonists encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

The lecture, part of a series of programming for Black History Month, is sponsored by the Friends of the Tewksbury Public Library and is presented in collaboration with Libraries Working Towards Social Justice. 

Registration required via Zoom link. Regsiter here.