Meadow Dibble, a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, will join us to discuss the Atlantic Black Box Project—a Portland-based public history initiative devoted to researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the slave trade and the economy of enslavement. Despite the 1820 federal act that made participation in the slave trade a capital offense, many merchants and mariners of this region continued to engage in this illicit traffic, right up to the eve of the Civil War. This highly lucrative activity, along with the related practices of provisioning plantations of the Americas and processing their produce in Northern mills, served as the primary fuel powering New England’s economic ascent. And yet our regional narratives have carefully avoided this topic for the past two centuries.
