The Baker-Nord Center for Humanities will launch its fall 2015 public events series Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 5 p.m. in the Allen Memorial Medical Library’s Ford Auditorium.
The event will feature a discussion by Richard Dunn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and winner of a 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Dunn will give a talk titled “A Tale of Two Plantations: a Comparative Approach to Caribbean and U.S. Slavery.”
In his book, Dunn reconstructed the individual lives and collective experiences of two thousand slaves who lived on Mesopotamia sugar estate in western Jamaica and Mount Airy plantation in Tidewater region in Virginia. In his talk, Dunn will compare slave life on the two plantations, demonstrating the huge demographic difference between the British Caribbean and the U.S. slave systems, and showing how the black people on both plantations suffered horribly, but in strikingly dissimilar ways.
A book sale and signing will immediately follow the reading.
The event is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended. To register, visit humanities.case.edu/wpgforms/registration-a-tale-of-two-plantations/.