Panel on Slavery and Religion, Old State House, 5 Feb.

On Tuesday, 5 February, at 5:15 P.M., the Old State House in Boston will host a meeting of the Boston Area Early American History Seminars sponsored and normally hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Another change from the seminar series’ usual format is that it will be a panel discussion of two papers rather than a discussion of one. The panelists will be:

• Richard Boles, George Washington University.
• Jared Hardesty, Boston College.
• Linford Fisher, Brown University, commenter.

Boles’s paper, “African American and Indian Church Affiliation: Reevaluating Race and Religion in the North, 1730-1776,” explores black and Indian participation in the region’s meetinghouses and how those congregants might have influenced theology and church practices. Hardesty’s “A World of Deference and Dependence: Slavery and Unfreedom in Eighteenth-Century Boston” challenges the slave/free dichotomy that most authors on colonial New England use.

This seminar is free and open to the public. Copies of the papers will be available at the event, but the authors won’t read them aloud. There will be a light buffet supper afterward, and the M.H.S. asks people to reserve a space by email.

The Old State House’s Representatives Hall is accessible only by a pretty, and pretty daunting, circular staircase. Photo of that staircase above by JoeyBLS Photography via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.