The Menokin Foundation and Mount Airy bring Historian Richard S. Dunn to the Northern Neck

Friday, March 20, 2015

LECTURE & BOOK SIGNING
3:30 – 5:00
(Copies will be available for purchase)
Rappahannock Community College
Auditorium, Room W122
52 Campus Drive, Warsaw, VA
(map)

RECEPTION
5:00 to 7:00
Mount Airy
Mill Pond Road, Warsaw VA
(map)

Seating is limited to 100. To ensure a space, please RSVP to menokin@menokin.org no later than March 16, 2015. If you need to cancel your reservation please let us know ASAP so that we may offer your space to another guest.

About The Book

A Tale of Two Plantations, a book the New York Times calls “a substantial achievement,” is the culmination of over 30 years of research and describes the differences between the slave societies in the Caribbean and in North America.  Dunn compares the lives of enslaved peoples on two massive plantations—Mount Airy in Warsaw, Virginia, and Mesopotamia in Jamaica—and tracks the slave populations on the two plantations in minute detail.  At Mount Airy, Dunn focuses primarily on those slaves owned by John Tayloe III, and then his son, William Henry Tayloe, from about 1809 up to the Civil War.  An accompanying web site to the book presents mini-biographies of 351 members of four big Mount Airy slave families, including 141 people listed in the 1870 U.S. census.  Mr. Dunn plans to emphasize that part of his research in the talk to our Northern Neck audience.

About the Author

Richard S. Dunn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his publications are Sugar and Slaves in 1972; The Papers of William Penn, edited with Mary Maples Dunn, in four volumes published in 1981–1987; and The Journal of John Winthrop, edited with Laetitia Yeandle, published in 1996. He also designed the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and was its founding director.

Co-sponsored By:
A.T. Johnson High School Alumni Association
Essex Public Library Friends
Essex County Museum and Historical Society
Middle Peninsula African-American Genealogical and Historical Society
Northern Neck/Middle Peninsula Preservation Society
Northern Neck of Virginia Historical  Society
Northumberland County Historical  Society
Rappahannock Community College
Richmond County Library
Richmond County Museum