Fall Speaker Series: Grappling with Manchester Slavery

Manchester, sometimes regarded as an abolitionist stronghold, has a more complicated story to tell. Lise Breen draws from forgotten accounts to trace a Manchester-focused history of slavery. This talk divulges the names of some of those enslaved and their enslavers, and shares records that reveal aspects about their lives–including family separation and sale, resistance to enslavement, and the persistence of quasi-slavery.

​

Lise Breen is an independent scholar whose research surfaces stories often ignored in Cape Ann’s histories. She has reconstructed aspects of the lives of African-descended people who endured the forces of slavery and has uncovered hidden accounts of captains and investors in the slave trade. She has shared some of this work at various museums talks, including at the Cape Ann Museum and in publications such as Gloucester Encounters. Her work has been supported in part by the Munson Institute, the Phillips Library, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for…