Lunch and Learn: From Gardner’s Wharf to Elizabeth Street — Searching for Rhode Island Slavery in the CMCH Archives 

Please join us for a virtual discussion by Dr. Edward Andrews. In this talk, Dr. Andrews will discuss Newport Gardner, an enslaved African who became a major free black community leader in Rhode Island during the post-Revolutionary years.   

 Dr. Andrews will pay special attention to the ways in which the archival holdings at The Connecticut Museum of Culture and History can help us understand the conditions of Gardner’s enslavement, the economic landscape he inhabited, and his persistent bondage at the hands of one of America’s most notorious slave traders.   

 This presentation is virtual and free. Click here to register. The Zoom link will be in the attached ticket you receive with your confirmation email.    

 Questions? Email Jennifer Busa at jennifer_busa@chs.org.  

 About the Speaker:  

Dr. Edward E. Andrews is an Associate Professor in The Department of History and Classics at Providence College. The author of Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard 2013), his new project, under contract with Cornell University Press, will be the first book-length treatment of Newport Gardner, an important yet overlooked figure in early American history.  He is currently a fellow for The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, as well as a Summer Scholars fellow through Providence College.    

Image:  A plan of the town of Newport in Rhode Island, 1777, by Charles Blaskowitz and William Faden. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/74692105/.