History Revealed: Harriet Scott

Settler Colonialism Seen Through the Life of Harriet Scott
With Jane Henderson

History Revealed Series
Program Date: Thursday, February 10, 2022
Video on YouTube

In partnership with the East Side Freedom Library and the Roseville Library.

Scholars of institutionalized racism have used the term “settler colonialism” to characterize the development of the United States — and many other countries. While this has been a useful concept leading to the asking — and answering — of productive questions, it has often, perhaps too often, been deployed at a level of abstraction that seems remote from the ways that indigenous people, white people, immigrants, and African Americans have lived their lives and interacted with each other.

Jane Henderson’s research engages the conversation around American slavery in the North within the framework of the expansion of the U.S. nation state through the frontier. Henderson uses Harriet (and Dred) Scott’s lives not only as pathways into reconstructing the lives of enslaved women and men at Fort Snelling but also to illuminate the shifting political economy of the region from centering the fur trade toward an economy based on the commodification of land, the commercialization of trade, and the exploitation of labor, both enslaved and free.

Past History Revealed Programs
More videos of some of our past History Revealed programs are available on the RCHS YouTube channel.
Ramsey County Historical Society Youtube Channel

To purchase titles from the History Revealed series, or other books of interest, see our partner, Subtext Books at https://subtextbooks.com/