Good afternoon, everybody. I want to welcome everyone to this afternoons panel. Public history and public memory, talking about slavery at president ial plantations. Im jennifer morgan, im a professor of history at new york university, where i work on colonial History Office enslaved people. Im very excited to be part of this afternoons conversation. Though my role here is primarily to facilitate and to learn, the presenters here have all spent their careers working in public history and have been at the front lines of important efforts to situate the president ial plantations back into the history of slavery or to situate slavery back into the history of the president ial plantations. Im not entirely sure i went back and forth on how to say that. Im not entirely sure is the right way to say it, but what i think is the crucial thing to say is that we are considering the processes that have erased the obvious location of the enslaved in the histories of the presidencies and everyone her
To situate the president ial plantations back into the history of slavery. Or to situate slavery back into the history of the president ial plantations. Not entirely sure. I went back and forth on how to say that. Im not entirely sure which is the right way to say it. The crucial thing to say is that we are considering the processes that have raised the obvious that heavy raced that have erased obvious location of the enslaved in the histories of the presidencies. Everyone here on this panel, and many of you in the audience are involved in efforts that precisely do not assume slavery is some sort of addition or add on to the president ial histories, but the two are inextricable. To that end im excited to hear each of this afternoons speakers talk about the work they are undergoing at the president ial plantations. I will introduce all of them now in the order in which they will speak. We planned the presentations to allow for significant time at the end for the panelists is to panelist
We wanted to restore the landscape of slavery. If you have come up to this mountaintop in jeffersons time, the first thing you would have seen most likely would have end in slave people. There would have been no place on this mountaintop that slavery was not visible, and we want to restore that, make that known to visitors who come here today. We are now in the middle of recreating or restoring dwellings along the main plantation street as well as rooms attached to the house just behind us. All this is part of an effort to sort of shift the focus away from jefferson and talk about the other people who essentially made his life possible. Just now, we are actually near jeffersons main house, the palladian mansion he built throughout his life, and we are standing next to military row, which is the main plantation street at monticello, through archaeology and documentary research, we know that over 20 workshops, storehouses, and dwellings lined this street. There were in slaved families he
That have been revealed. If you had visited monticello 20 years ago, you would have just seen jeffersons beautiful new classical villa, but what we wanted to do was change that. We wanted to restore the landscape of slavery. If you had come up to this mountaintop in jeffersons time, the first thing you would have seen most likely would have been enslaved people. There would have been no place on this mountaintop that slavery was not visible, and we want to restore that, make that known to visitors who come here today. We are now in the middle of recreating or restoring dwellings along the main plantation street as well as rooms attached to the house just behind us. All this is part of an effort to sort of shift the focus away from just jefferson and talk about the other people who essentially made his life possible. Right now, we are actually just near jeffersons main house, the palladian mansion he built throughout his life, and we are standing next to mulberry row which is the main p
20 years ago, you would have, the mountain and justine jeffersons beautiful neoclassical villa. What we wanted to do was change that. We wanted to restore the landscape of slavery because of you had come up this mountaintop in jeffersons time, the first thing you would have seen would be enslaved people. There would have been no place on this mountaintop that slavery was not visible. , maket to restore that that known to visitors who come here, today. We are now in the middle of recreating or restoring ,wellings along mulberry row the main plantation street, as well as rooms attached to the house, just behind us. All of this is part of an effort to shift the focus away from just jefferson, and talk about the dozens of other people who essentially made his life possible. Are just near jeffersons main house, the mansion that he built throughout his life. We are standing next to mulberry row, which is the main plantation street at monticello. It is about 1300 feet. Through documentary res