Less than 20 Tickets Remain for Wednesday Lecture at Lyman Allyn

(NEW LONDON) - On Wednesday, February 15, the Thames River Heritage Park and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum will host the third talk in their Stories from the Park lecture series: For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England.

Those attending in-person at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum will have an opportunity to meet the authors, purchase books and have them signed. Light hors d’oeuvres and wine will be served during the reception, which starts at 6:00 PM. The talk will begin at 7:00 PM.
ADVANCED REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.Allegra DiBonaventura will address her book “For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England.” Her book focuses on powerful colonial New London families such as the Winthrops along with powerless ones such as the Jacksons, who were enslaved. In the tradition of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s classic, A Midwife’s Tale, comes this groundbreaking narrative by one of America’s most promising colonial historians. Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. 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 intertwining 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 was hugely impactful 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.AUTHOR BIOAllegra di Bonaventura is the associate dean for graduate academic support at Yale University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She received a PhD from Yale University and a JD from Yale Law School. She is the author of For Adam’s Sake, which was awarded the New England Historical Association James P. Hanlan Book Award and named one of the best books of 2013 by the Wall Street Journal.