Mon Nov 16 · 12pm
Public Research Talk: Transcendentalism, Memorialization, and Harvard's Slavery History
A Concord house tied to a founding benefactor of Harvard Medical School is threatened by a state road project. Thoreau was the first to look into its owner's enslavement of Brister Freeman, who lived in Walden Woods before him and protested poll taxes decades before Thoreau did. The lecture argues that Harvard's reckoning with its slavery history continues a Transcendentalist project.