History Studio: Enslavement in the Puritan Village with Jane Sciacca

 

Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 7:00-8:00pm

A History Studio featuring Jane Sciacca, Massachusetts historian

Colonial Sudbury, Massachusetts, was designated the Puritan Village by author Sumner Chilton Powell in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the founding of this quintessential New England town in 1638. Yet this quiet rural village also had a darker history that is often overlooked. Sudbury’s Puritan inhabitants, including some of the most prominent citizens in town, held and sold enslaved Black people throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stories gleaned from preserved records highlight the lives of men, women and children held in bondage, including a court case involving an enslaved boy repeatedly beaten and left scarred by his master less than thirty years after the town’s founding, as well as the bill of sale of Phebey, age two, to a woman in another town. Local author Jane Sciacca uncovers the hidden side of suffering in this New England town.

We will do our best to monitor your questions and comments during the conversation. A recording will be publicly available in the History Studio Archive, and a livestream available on our YouTube channel.

Questions? Email commons@masshistoryalliance.org

About the speaker:

Jane Sciacca is a retired national park ranger with a degree in history education from Simmons University. Her work as an interpreter for the National Park Service in Concord, Boston and Cambridge led to her interest in researching enslavement and abolition in her own community of Wayland, where she has lived with her family for more than fifty years. As chair of the Wayland Historical Commission, she oversaw the 1981 publication of the first history of Wayland as a separate town, The Puritan Village Evolves.

Conversations on the Commons

Where people from Massachusetts history organizations get to vent, empathize, laugh, complain, think, collaborate, brainstorm, plan, and in general be up to no good.

History Studio: Enslavement in the Puritan Village with Jane Sciacca _Archive

 

Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 7:00-8:00pm

A History Studio featuring Jane Sciacca, Massachusetts historian

Colonial Sudbury, Massachusetts, was designated the Puritan Village by author Sumner Chilton Powell in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the founding of this quintessential New England town in 1638. Yet this quiet rural village also had a darker history that is often overlooked. Sudbury’s Puritan inhabitants, including some of the most prominent citizens in town, held and sold enslaved Black people throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stories gleaned from preserved records highlight the lives of men, women and children held in bondage, including a court case involving an enslaved boy repeatedly beaten and left scarred by his master less than thirty years after the town’s founding, as well as the bill of sale of Phebey, age two, to a woman in another town. Local author Jane Sciacca uncovers the hidden side of suffering in this New England town.

We will do our best to monitor your questions and comments during the conversation. A recording will be publicly available in the History Studio Archive, and a livestream available on our YouTube channel.

Questions? Email commons@masshistoryalliance.org

About the speaker:

Jane Sciacca is a retired national park ranger with a degree in history education from Simmons University. Her work as an interpreter for the National Park Service in Concord, Boston and Cambridge led to her interest in researching enslavement and abolition in her own community of Wayland, where she has lived with her family for more than fifty years. As chair of the Wayland Historical Commission, she oversaw the 1981 publication of the first history of Wayland as a separate town, The Puritan Village Evolves.

Conversations on the Commons

Where people from Massachusetts history organizations get to vent, empathize, laugh, complain, think, collaborate, brainstorm, plan, and in general be up to no good.