Of Biscuits and Liberty; or, Freedom Never Tasted so Good: The Condition of Enslaved Humanity in the Antebellum United States
The following was a lecture I presented in the First Year Seminar Series at Bard College at Simon’s Rock (when I used to teach there). Each text in the seminar was accompanied by a lecture. This lecture was intended to supplement our reading of Frederick Douglass's narrative. Recently, the students in my class entitled “Colonialism, Capitalism, and Slavery” had to find an on-line archive of historical documents, browse the archive, write a review of the website, and write a bibliographic essay on the theme or period that the archive represented. One of the students came across an archive at the University of Virginia entitled “ The Geography of Slavery ” which contains both transcriptions and digital images of advertisements for runaway slaves and servants from the Chesapeake bay region from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth-century. One advertisement from the Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer in particular caught our class’s attention. The notice ra...
