D.C. Mondays: Facing Georgetown's History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation
Join the editors of Facing Georgetown's History as they introduce their new book on the history of the university's involvement in slavery.
Georgetown University's relationship with slavery and its reverberations through history is a microcosm of the American story — the contradictions of liberty and enslavement at the country's founding, the rise of the domestic slave trade to the Deep South, and the political conflict over slavery and its overthrow amid civil war. Georgetown's past is also emblematic of the complex entanglement of higher education and religious institutions with slavery.
Facing Georgetown's History includes crucial primary sources, drawn from the university's and Maryland Jesuits' archives, that document this tangled history.
About Elsa Barraza Mendoza
Elsa Barraza Mendoza is an assistant professor in the History Department at Middlebury College in Vermont and the associate curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive. Her research focuses on the lives of people enslaved at universities, as well as the financial connections between slavery and higher education in the United States.
About Adam Rothman
Adam Rothman is a professor in the History Department at Georgetown University. Rothman studies the history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, and the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. His most recent book is Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2015).