Join our free seminar series this summer:
“TOWARDS A NEW GRAMMAR OF JUSTICE: JOHN SWANSON JACOBS’ WORLD-ALTERING WORDS“
Tuesday | July 23rd | 6 pm
Register here
The Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project in collaboration with the Redwood Library and Atheneum, presents Jonathan Schroeder’s overview of John Swanson Jacobs’ remarkable 1855 autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, which was lost until Schroeder found it in 2016.
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian of literature, medicine, and emotion, and a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2016, in Australia, he rediscovered John Swanson Jacobs’s long-lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; republished by The University of Chicago Press in 2024 and profiled in the New York Times, NPR, and elsewhere, his edition features the first full-length biography of Harriet Jacobs’s globe-spanning brother, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Schroeder is also the co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Material Turn.
Harrison Room, Redwood Library and Atheneum, 50 Bellevue Ave, Newport | Free
