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Community Corner

Author Talk with Allegra di Bonaventura

Allegra di Bonaventura, author of For Adam’s Sake, will speak about her book on Sunday, January 19, at 2 p.m.  Her recently released narrative is an account of the intertwined lives of early New England families centered in New London, Connecticut based on the meticulous diary kept by Joshua Hempstead. Monte Cristo Bookshop, an independent bookstore in New London, will sell books at the event.  A book signing will follow the presentation.



Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London.  As his remarkable diary—kept from 1711 until 1758—reveals, he was also a slave owner who owned Adam Jackson for over thirty years.  In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this master-slave relationship and traces the stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution.



Slavery is often left out of our collective memory of New England’s history, but it had a huge impact on the central unit of colonial life: the family. In every corner, the lines between slavery and freedom were blurred as families across the social spectrum fought to survive.  In this enlightening study, a new portrait of an era emerges.

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“This is an extraordinary story about ordinary people in a pre-revolutionary New England family.  Among the people are a master and his slave, the only account of such psychological depth I have seen in all the family histories of New England.  Impeccably researched, elegantly written, For Adams' Sake is a model of its kind.” (Joseph Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation)

Allegra di Bonaventura is an assistant dean at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in New Haven, Connecticut.  She holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

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Prior to joining the Graduate School, Allegra was a Fulbright Fellow to Italy, practiced law, taught at Rutgers School of Law and was an assistant editor at the Papers of Benjamin Franklin.



 

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