Podcasts and Radio

Nashoba, Frances Wright’s intentional community designed to end slavery, went sideways for reasons we’ll cover in this episode. The physical abuse of the enslaved there might be what we find most upsetting nowadays, but what really got people worked up about Nashoba at the time? It’s something called “amalgamation,” the mixing of people of different racial backgrounds. Frances Wright openly advocated this mixing and saw it as the future of America. Many people were outraged. For this episode we go deep into the context of this tension, a long-standing source of anxiety for white Americans and too often a justification for curtailing the rights of African-Americans. The actual history of interracial relationships under slavery, even in the free Northern States, was complicated, more so than we usually hear in history class, and it’s still reverberating today, though as a nation and as people, we’ve made progress. Our expert guests this week are historians Leslie M. Harris (Northwestern University) and Amrita Myers (Indiana University). Leslie goes into the meaning and context of amalgamation and how it was weaponized against anti-slavery organizers–and what it says about America’s anxieties surrounding race and class. Amrita helps us explore the life and times of Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman who was also the wife of one of America’s early Vice Presidents–though he never freed her. She helps us glimpse what we need to do as historians to restore the stories of women like Chinn, which are vital to understanding America’s past.