One of my fellow Mellons just informed me about a very interesting anthropology lecture that will be taking place tomorrow during free hour. Unfortunately it conflicts with the info-session about the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) so I guess people will have to choose between which one to go to. I just included a description of the talk she emailed me. Prof. James A. Moore from the Anthropology Department will be discussing his research about the communities of enslaved and freed people of African descent in 19th Century New York.

Too Much Past for This Present: Silenced Landscapes of Slavery and Freedom in the 19th Century New York City Hinterland
Wednesday, March 17 Free Hour, PH room 311

History while written from facts, does not inscribe them all. In the late Eighteenth Century, the widespread dependence on enslaved African descendants’ labor would be obvious to any traveler passing through the fields and farms, towns and shops of the New York City hinterland. New York States gradual abolition of slavery in the early Nineteenth Century brought little change. Queens County had the greatest percentage of free African descendants of any New York State county from 1820 to 1890 with churches, schools, homes and neighborhoods scattered over the county.

The materiality of this landscape is not lost. The early Twenty-first Century traveler through this now urban, former hinterland, would see the locales of resistance, but not recognize them: visit the house museums, but not be aware of the slave quarters: and hear the old neighborhood names, but not sense their emotional freight. The narrative of slavery and freedom would not be read from this landscape. The history has not been erased, it has been written over. This study examines the production of archaeological knowledge of slavery in the North.