The Afterlife of Charity Folks: Slavery's Ghosts, Family History, and Descendant DNA

The Afterlife of Charity Folks: Slavery's Ghosts, Family History, and Descendant DNA

Jessica Millward (Associate Professor of History, University of California, Irvine)

20 October 2022, 17:00 (Thursday, 2nd week, Michaelmas 2022)

Microsoft Teams.

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Professor Millward, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, a superb historian of women and gender, will speak on her lauded first book, Finding Charity’s Folk:  Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland. There, Millward considers enslaved and free women of color, families and communities in colonial and early national eras Maryland.  She details, in particular, the transition from slavery to freedom pursued by enslaved women who went onto reconstitute their families and to contribute to free black community formation.  Millward’s emphasis on this early period addresses an era about which relatively little on the enslaved southern female has been written.  Her work draws on thousands of documents that she mined in archives in Maryland, Ghana and Britain.  She used, quite extensively and brilliantly, the apprenticeship records of thousands of enslaved people who gained their freedom during the Revolutionary era as a window into the particular gendered characteristics that marked the female’s transition from slavery to freedom.  Her work also is supported by records from local courts and churches, manuscript census, and birth and death records.  

All welcome!