The History Department welcomes Seth Rockman who will to talk about his new book PLANTATION GOODS on Thursday, February 13th at 5pm in SMSU 294.
Book signing to follow with books for sale from the amazing Broadway Books.
đź“… February 13 ,2025
đź•‘ 5:00 PM
đź“Ť Smith Memorial Student Union (SMSU 294)
1825 SW Broadway
Portland, OR 97201
✔️ RSVP: https://bit.ly/platationgoods2025
In this talk, Rockman tells the biggest stories of early American history through the most mundane artifacts: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear. In following these goods from the communities in which they were made to the communities in which they were used, Rockman rethinks the geography of slavery and freedom in the decades between American independence and the Civil War. He poses questions that continue to preoccupy us in the age of the iPhone and fair-trade coffee: what are the moral, ecological, and political relationships linking consumers and producers across long distances? What does it mean to be “complicit"?
Seth Rockman is an associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
Co-sponsored by The School of Business, Textile Arts, Sociology and Geography.