Details — Faculty Lecture Series Talk by Angela Keysor — January 25
| Date: 1/25 | Time: 7 pm |
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The January talk in the Karl W. Weiss ’87 Faculty Lecture Series for 2016-17 will be held on Wednesday, January 25, at 7 p.m. in Campus Center 301/302. Angela Keysor, assistant professor in the Department of History, will present “Racial Borders of Belonging: Community Networks of Care, African Americans and Citizenship in Massachusetts, 1780-1810” A more detailed description of the talk can be found here.
While the enslaved may have gained legal freedom in Massachusetts as a result of the 1783 Quock Walker cases, these newly freed residents were refused access to local networks of care. Two legal decisions rendered by Massachusetts county courts in 1796 attempted to bring clarity to heated discussions among town authorities over whether newly freed men and women should be considered citizens in the realm of local health care. The Shelburne and Greenfield decisions instead created legal confusion. As a result, community authorities interpreted ‘freedom’ in vastly different ways. Selectmen used arguments over money to construct substantial differences in the welfare a town gave to their white and black residents. This paper will follow the experiences of African American residents of Charlestown, Massachusetts to argue that after the Revolutionary War, local healthcare networks within Massachusetts transitioned into racialized welfare processes.