I am now several months from graduating and completing the senior thesis that originated in a series of blog posts on this site regarding Israel Trask, his relationship to Amherst College, and his life as an enslaver. While I am proud of the work I have done, something has been nagging at me, something that…
Students who took Professor Elizabeth Herbin-Triant’s course “Slavery in US History & Culture” during the Fall 2021 semester visited the Archives & Special Collections to explore primary sources related to slavery. This blog post is by student Anna Kruesel ’22, who chose to focus on a single letter from the Israel E. Trask Papers. The…
Please join us at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry (second floor, Frost Library) on Monday, October 18 at 4:00! The Steering Committee of A Racial History of Amherst College invites any and all interested members of the Amherst College community to discuss genealogist Nicka Smith’s presentation of October 4, 2021–and the important questions of whether…
Nicka Smith’s talk on October 4 was recorded and is available on the college’s YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/RBe9uHxSTJo The Amherst Student published an article about the talk: “Nicka Smith Delivers Talk on Israel Trask and the Trask 250” Anna Smith ’22 published an op-ed piece on Trask to propose that the college acquire his mansion in…
History is complicated. Over the past two months, as I have been traveling across New England and the South, I kept hearing this phrase. Lincoln was not an anti-racist. The founding fathers were enslavers. Israel Trask was not solely bad. If you have read my previous posts in this series, you might be surprised to…
I recently saw a comment on a New England historical society’s Instagram post about Juneteenth events in the area questioning why the day would be celebrated here. The commenter seemed to believe that the history of New England is distinctly separate from the history of slavery, especially as Vermont was the first state to abolish…
Perhaps the darkest documented period in Israel Trask’s tenure as an enslaver comes in the form of the 1811 German Coast Uprising. Frequently termed the largest slave revolt in US history, the 1811 uprising spanned two days (January 8-10, 1811), three parishes (St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, and Jefferson), and involved more than 500…
This post is the first of a series on Israel Trask. Last semester, I finally nailed down my thesis topic–the memorialization of slavery and Israel Trask in the archives–which of course involved describing it to numerous people. In so doing, I was surprised at just how many people didn’t know who Israel Trask was and how he…
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