A pathbreaking study of intertwined Black, Indigenous, and Anglo-colonial communities in revolutionary New England In this interdisciplinary social and cultural history, historian Christine M. DeLucia recounts the intertwined lives of Native, African American, and Euro-colonial people in eighteenth-century New England. Offering a dynamic retelling of the familiar years of the American Revolution and its aftermath, DeLucia recovers routes of mobility, resistance, and opportunity from Narragansett Bay to the Piscataqua River and the streetscapes of New Haven and Newport. DeLucia recounts the intersecting stories of the African American family of Newport, Violet, and their son Jacob Freeman; the Native American (Nehantic) family of Ruth and her son Aaron Waukeet; and Ezra Stiles, the prominent colonial minister and later president of Yale College whose own family enslaved, indentured, and dispossessed individuals over many decades. She shows how Native and African American families fought to secure their independence, communities, cultures, and homes as they reckoned with the stressful shifts and the searing violence and displacement of the American Revolutionary War. By refusing to take contemporary writers like Stiles at their word about Black and Native people and politics of New England, DeLucia helps us imagine a far more complex and contested world—and provides a model for how to write inclusive and expansive history.
