Historic Northampton's exhibit gallery
will be closed for the winter season from January 1 - February 28, 2025
will be closed for the winter season from January 1 - February 28, 2025
Be our "match maker"
this Valentine's Day. We're very close to meeting our $200,000 Challenge Match. Any donation given between now through February 14, 2025, will be matched dollar-for-dollar doubling your impact. Contributions between $500 to $1,000 will be tripled. |
Upcoming Events
Slavery and Freedom in Northampton and in the Colonial North:
A Four-Part Lecture Series
A Four-Part Lecture Series
In Partnership with the Northampton Reparations Study Commission
Of Bondage and Isolation: Meditations on the Lives of Black Women
Enslaved in the Pioneer Valley
Enslaved in the Pioneer Valley
Dr. Jennifer DeClue, Smith College
Moderated by Gina Nortonsmith, Archivist, Northeastern University and Historic Northampton Board Member
Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 7 pm
On Zoom
On Zoom
Graphic Silhouette of Hannah, her baby, and Mingo (Design Division, 2025)
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The names of Black women enslaved by the powerful men remembered in history as “River Gods” can be found in their diaries, account books, wills, probate inventories, and church records. These records do the good work of offering confirmation that John Stoddard owned a woman called Elizabeth; that Jonathan Edwards owned Leah and Rose and Venus; that the Dwight family owned Sylvia Church; and that the Phelps family owned Peg and Rose and Phillis and Rose's daughter Phillis.
Smith College professor Jennifer DeClue will discuss how these archival records make incontrovertible the fact of slavery’s violent history in the valley, but leave many questions unanswered. Dr. DeClue will work to paint a clearer picture of what life might have been like for Black women enslaved here, in the long years before abolition would unfold in Massachusetts. |
Dr. Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor in The Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She is a queer studies scholar who specializes in Black feminism, gender and chattel slavery, queer of color critique, film studies, popular culture, and the avant-garde. She earned her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and has been teaching at Smith College since 2015. Her book Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema was published with Duke University Press in the fall of 2022 and received the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award. As a fellow of the Slavery North Initiative, she is currently writing a book titled, Enslaved in New England: Black Women and the Afterlife of Northern Bondage.
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Upcoming Lectures
More information and registration will be forthcoming
More information and registration will be forthcoming
Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson
Wednesday, March 19, 2025 on Zoom at 7 pm |
Living and Laboring in the Business
of Slavery in Rhode Island Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara Thursday, April 10, 2025
on Zoom at 7 pm |
Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the founding Director of the Slavery North Initiative which supports research and research creation on the study of Canadian Slavery and slavery in the American North. She founded the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first-ever research center focused on the overlooked 200-year history of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery.
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The Business of slavery—specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of Black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. In the colonial period, Rhode Islanders dominated the American trade in African slaves and provided the slave-labor-dependent West Indies with basic necessities. In the post-colonial period, as slavery was legally dismantled, Rhode Islanders became the leading producers of slave clothing. Black people resisted their bondage, fought for their freedom, and strove to build a community in a racially hostile colony and state; their assertions of humanity shaped Rhode Island society, politics, and economy. The erasure of this history has allowed for a dangerous myth—that the North has no history of racism to overcome and that white northerners had no substantive investments in race-based slavery.
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Acknowledging Indigenous history
Acknowledging Indigenous History
Here, we acknowledge that we stand on Indigenous land, inhabited by Native American people for roughly 11,000 years, since the glaciers receded. This place that we now call Northampton was known to Native people as Nonotuck or Norwottuck. Nonotuck homelands stretched across both sides of the Kwinitekw (now called the Connecticut River), including the present-day towns of Amherst, Hadley, Hatfield, South Hadley, Northampton, and Easthampton.
Nonotuck people were closely connected, through trade, diplomacy, and kinship, to other Native communities in the region: the Quaboag in present-day Brookfield; the Agawam in present-day Springfield; the Woronoco in present-day Westfield; the Pocumtuck in present-day Deerfield; and the Sokoki in present-day Northfield. During the early 1600s, these Native groups engaged in reciprocal trade relations with English colonial settlers and with other Native nations. By the late 1600s, however, the pressures of colonial warfare forced many Native families to relocate, taking shelter in other Native territories. We offer condolences for the Nonotuck people who were forced to leave their homeland, while also offering gratitude for the Native communities that took them in.
Despite the loss of land due to colonial settlement, a number of Native nations have persisted across the territory that we now call “New England.” These include: the Nipmuc to the East; the Wampanoag and Narragansett to the Southeast; the Mohegan, Pequot, and Schaghticoke to the South; the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican to the West; and the Abenaki to the North, among others. Recognizing that the entirety of the North American continent constitutes Indigenous homelands, we affirm, honor, and respect the sovereignty of these and hundreds of other Indigenous Native American and First Nations peoples who survive today.
Learn More
Nonotuck people were closely connected, through trade, diplomacy, and kinship, to other Native communities in the region: the Quaboag in present-day Brookfield; the Agawam in present-day Springfield; the Woronoco in present-day Westfield; the Pocumtuck in present-day Deerfield; and the Sokoki in present-day Northfield. During the early 1600s, these Native groups engaged in reciprocal trade relations with English colonial settlers and with other Native nations. By the late 1600s, however, the pressures of colonial warfare forced many Native families to relocate, taking shelter in other Native territories. We offer condolences for the Nonotuck people who were forced to leave their homeland, while also offering gratitude for the Native communities that took them in.
Despite the loss of land due to colonial settlement, a number of Native nations have persisted across the territory that we now call “New England.” These include: the Nipmuc to the East; the Wampanoag and Narragansett to the Southeast; the Mohegan, Pequot, and Schaghticoke to the South; the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican to the West; and the Abenaki to the North, among others. Recognizing that the entirety of the North American continent constitutes Indigenous homelands, we affirm, honor, and respect the sovereignty of these and hundreds of other Indigenous Native American and First Nations peoples who survive today.
Learn More
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