Category: Colonial History

The Golden Age of Our Country

7/4/2019

Side portrait engraving of man from the late 1700s.

St. George Tucker, engraved by Saint-Mémin, Harvard Law School Library collection.

This February while at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, I came across St. George Tucker's A Dissertation on Slavery with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, in the State of Virginia. I received the William Reese Company Fellowship to research the papers of Captain John Gabriel Stedman, and other collections related to Suriname and the Americas before 1810. In a search for documents on slavery in Virginia, which I thought had the possibility to reveal more about early music and dance in the colonies and early Republic, I found Tucker's Dissertation.

Although it didn't end up helping me with that research, Tucker's opinions about the abolition of slavery struck me. Here was a man, standing up in front of the Virginia legislature, calling out Thomas Jefferson specifically and calling the United States more or less a bunch of hypocrites.

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Views of the Creole Bania

2/28/2019

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I spent February at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on a William Reese Company Fellowship, looking at the papers of Captain John Gabriel Stedman and investigating the banjo's early history in Suriname and the Caribbean.

This is a banjo, one of the earliest images of a banjo. This engraving is only one of four pre-1800s images of the banjo, taken from Stedman's memoir Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname. The special collections at the Bell Library have Stedman's diaries from Suriname, notes and journals from after his time in Europe, the original 1790 manuscript, and many different versions of the published memoir. To the left is a hand-colored plate from the English first edition, while below are versions from the German, French, and Dutch editions.

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Come in, the stacks are open.

The Golden Age of Our Country

Views of the Creole Bania

Come in, the stacks are open.

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