Seth Rockman with Stephanie McCurry: Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

Historian and author Seth Rockman discusses his new book "Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery" with fellow writer Stephanie McCurry.

This event will take place in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on the 7th Floor.

The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.

By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture.

Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.

At this event,  historian and author Seth Rockman will discuss hid new book and more with fellow writer Stephanie McCurry. 

To join the event in person | Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

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. He lives in Providence.

Stephanie McCurry teaches at Columbia University where she is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History. She is the author of three books including Confederate Reckoning:  Power and Politics in the Civil War South which won multiple book prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, the TLS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Irish Times.  In 2023-24 she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at NYPL. She is working on a book about the post-Civil War United States, tentatively titled A Revolution in Every Household:  A New History of Reconstruction, that identifies the intimate as a domain of power that reframes the challenge of the era. The book is under contract with Simon and Schuster.

GET THE BOOK

• Borrow: NYPL Catalog


• E-Book app: SimplyE, available on iOS and Android

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ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

In-Person

• Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

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All programs are subject to change or cancellation. All events at The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library are subject to recording and photography. 

The 7 Stories Up Series at SNFL is made possible by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).