March 23, 2025 · 3 p.m.
Garden House
Free
KTM&HC's Revolutionary Perspectives series continues on Sunday, March 23 with an in-person talk by R. Isabela Morales.
Who gets to live the American Dream? Author and historian R. Isabela Morales discusses her award-winning book Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, a multi-generational history of the Townsend family. Born into slavery in Alabama, the Townsends won their freedom in 1860 and spent their lives pursuing social and economic mobility in a hostile society. The children of a wealthy white cotton planter and several enslaved African American women whom he owned, the Townsends were emancipated and inherited their father's $200,000 fortune when he died. Searching for communities where they could exercise their freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the Townsend family traveled across the country in the following decades: homesteading in Ohio and Kansas, fighting for the Union Army in Mississippi, mining for silver in the Colorado Rockies, and, in the case of one son, returning to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been enslaved. Discover what one extraordinary American family can tell us about race, money, and opportunity in U.S. history.
R. Isabela Morales, Ph.D. is an award-winning author and historian of slavery. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Among other honors, it won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the foremost international book award for the history of slavery and emancipation, and the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, one of the most prestigious book prizes in Civil War history. Dr. Morales is the founding editor of the Princeton & Slavery Project at Princeton University and the Education and Exhibit Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, Central New Jersey's first dedicated Black history museum. She received her doctorate in history from Princeton University in 2019.
KTM&HC's Revolutionary Perspectives series, in its second season, celebrates innovative approaches to how we discover, interpret, and share American history, with an emphasis on themes of memory and identity. The series is supported by a grant from the Wadsworth R. Lewis Fund. Thank you!
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