BRECHT FORUM -- Westside Hiway & Bank Street - Manhattan, NY
fone: 212.242.4201
Friday, October 03
7:30 pm
BOOK PARTY / FORUM
Bury the Chains
The Story of How Slavery Was Abolished in the British Empire--Myth and
Fact
Adam Hochschild
British abolition is usually mythologized--for example in last year's
feature film Amazing Grace--to give the impression that, inspired by
religion, a benevolent Britain simply decided to end its central role in
the Atlantic slave trade, and, later, to free more than 800,000 slaves
throughout its empire. In Bury the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the
Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, author Adam Hochschild relates how that
version of history ignores the crucial role of slave rebellions in the
Caribbean and the story, in Britain, of the world's first grassroots
human rights campaign.
In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London bookstore and printing shop to
pursue the daunting goal of ending slavery in the largest empire on
earth. Using innovative methods such as petitions, lapel buttons, and
eyewitness accounts by former slaves and a repentant former slave-ship
captain, the group pioneered many of the tools that activists still rely
on. Within five years, more than 300,000 Britons, mostly women, were
refusing to buy slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean. By 1838, a
quarter century before the end of slavery in the U.S., they succeeded in
bringing slavery in the British Empire to an end--a feat that would have
seemed as unlikely in eighteenth-century England as banning automobiles
does today.
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and other books, has
written for the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Review of
Books, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and other publications.
He also co-founded the magazine Mother Jones. He teaches narrative
writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of
California at Berkeley.
Suggested donation: $6/$10/$15
BRECHT FORUM -- Westside Hiway & Bank Street - Manhattan, NY
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s. e. anderson is author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners"
Social Activism is not a hobby: it's a Lifestyle lasting a Lifetime
http://www.blackeducator.org http://blackeducator.blogspot.com
Posted By: Carmen Colon
Wednesday, October 1st 2008 at 12:06PM
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