Examining how memory both catalyzes and curtails social change, this book concerns how commemorative culture shaped antislavery politics in early national Massachusetts. Abolitionists drew on their state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize opposition to Southern slavery, but black and white activists diverged in terms of how they idealized black historical agency.
This is a graceful, elegant book that is also very, very smart. Minardi's subject is history itself and its uses in constructing identity-the chronicling, justifying, memorializing, and explaining of slavery and the Revolutionary-era ending of slavery in Massachusetts. She elaborates, fine-tunes, and textures the 'constructed amnesia' argument about the history of slavery in New England in important ways, demonstrating just how this was in fact a history constructed of both presence and absence. In style and imagination, this manuscript powerfully evokes Jill Lepore's The Name of War, and in skillful reading of material objects as well as texts, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's The Age of Homespun.
