Other[ed] Colonial Voices: Slavery and Indenture in New York

Other[ed] Colonial Voices

Harvard's Colonial North America project holds thousands of images, that tell thousands of stories about colonial and early American lives. The stories that are told most fully, however, are often those of society's most privileged - financially comfortable, literate, White men. To learn more about the lives of people outside that narrow group, we often have to dig deeply into materials that only provide a glimpse into what we know must have been much fuller lives.

This site will use an archival item from Houghton Library, the "Evert Jansen Wendell collection of contracts for the sale of slaves, 1796-1829," to begin an exploration of the lives of Black people, Jewish people, and White women in Early America. This archival item only contains three contracts, but these unique documents raise a lot of questions about diverse identities and labor in turn of the 19th century New York.

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