Jeff Weston: Speaker Series, Aug 27

Jonathan Schroeder, Ph.D. provides an overview of John Swanson Jacobs’ autobiographical slave narrative.

Join our free seminar series this summer:

“The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” with Jeff Weston

Tuesday | August 27th | 6 pm | Newport Art Museum

Register here

“The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” with Jeff Weston

August 27, 2024 6:00 pm

Join Newport Middle Passage for an evening of engaging discussion with local tour guide Jeff Weston for this overview of Newport History, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”. This lecture is a part of the Newport Middle Passage Summer Series. Weston will present the complex history of Newport. Jeff is an expert storyteller and founder of Northstar Touring.

Visitors may also examine the Newport Art Museum’s Black History of Newport installation. Victoria Johnson, a lifelong Newporter, advocate, and educator, has documented celebratory mentions of Black Newporters throughout the 20th century. Select newspaper clippings and original scrapbooks are on display for visitors to interact with and learn about our city’s Black History.

Please join us for this illuminating discussion!

Jeff Weston is a Rhode Island “Prodigal Son” who grew up in Bristol, Rhode Island. He went to the University of Connecticut where he was an accounting major and also attained a master’s degree from Fairfield University. As a very successful marketing executive, he retired eight years ago and moved back to Newport to care for his elderly parents.

He volunteered to be a docent at Trinity Church, and it ignited a passion for both history and touring. He graduated from the International Tour Management Institute and after a few stints with local tour organizations, including the Newport Historical Society, founded his own upscale tour company “Rhogue Island Tours”, which specializes in personalized entertaining, irreverent but historically accurate tours. He has researched Rhode Island history thoroughly, pouring over 300 books from many of the local libraries, including the esteemed Redwood Library, to ensure all listeners are getting an accurate yet often provocative narrative. For more information contact Jeff Weston at jeffwestontours@gmail.com.

Jonathan Schreoder: Speaker Series, July 23

Jonathan Schroeder, Ph.D. provides an overview of John Swanson Jacobs’ autobiographical slave narrative.

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

Jonathan Schroeder, Ph.D., Rhode Island School of Design

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

Black Regiment Commemoration 2023

“The Backstory of the Black Regiment: Soldiers’ Ties to Community and Kin”

Lecture by Peter Fay, Patriots Park Commemoration by NAACP

Patriots Park, Portsmouth, RI,

August 27, 2023, 3 pm

Philo Phillips of North Kingstown was 27 when his owner sold him into the state’s Black Regiment during the Revolutionary War. Now a soldier, he marched and fought for his life and freedom. However, like many soldiers, he was not alone. His wife accompanied him throughout the war as a “camp follower”, furnishing food, laundry, and nursing. She also earned income as a washerwoman for other soldiers. A year later, she learned her husband was captured by the British troops during a skirmish and was held captive in Newport. Six months later he escaped back to the regiment where his wife remained. At the end of the war, after five long years of service, Philo Phillips was honorably discharged.

After the war, he was impoverished, and his wife was blind. He sought and found help from the Black community, and years later the Providence Gazette commemorated the death of this “respectable man of color” at age 75.

Soldiers’ lives depended on their comrades in battle. But Mr. Fay will uncover the stories of women and others whose support was crucial to the Black Regiment’s success during the privations of war and its aftermath.