ONLINE - Book Discussion: New England Bound by Wendy Warren

The Nonfictioneers meet on the first Tuesday of the month to discuss classic and contemporary non-fiction titles.

This month we'll be discussing "New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America" by Wendy Warren 2016

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. A New York Times Notable Book. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection. A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year. Winner of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award for Social History. Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize. Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize

"This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." ―David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports.

And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.

This title is a Hoopla audiobook available for checkout from the Ridgefield Library: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11781364

If you are new to using Hoopla we've created this video with instructions on how to install and use Hoopla: https://youtu.be/h2AOAMCCe0w

Please register below to receive the Zoom meeting invite in the confirmation and reminder emails. If you have not received it by the day before the program please email lalambton@ridgefieldlibrary.org.