Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family
Author Debra Bruno will tell us about her journey into the nearly forgotten history of Northern slavery and of the thousands of enslaved people brought in chains to Manhattan and the Hudson Valley.
Bruno grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley knowing little about her Dutch heritage, until a historian told her that her Dutch ancestors were almost certainly slaveholders. Shaken, and driven by this knowledge, Bruno began to unearth her family’s past.
In discussing her book A Hudson Valley Reckoning, Bruno will share the story of white and Black lives impacted by the stain of slavery and its long legacy of racism, as she investigates the erasure of the uncomfortable truths about our family and national histories.
Debra Bruno is a longtime Washington journalist and teacher, with a career covering law, politics, the arts, music, dance, theater, books, culture, health, and international issues. She has worked at Moment Magazine, Legal Times, and Roll Call. From 2011-2014, she was a freelance writer in Beijing, writing articles on subjects as diverse as expat divorce and author Amy Tan for the Wall Street Journal; rowing in a dragon boat for the Washington Post; and Chinese hutongs for Atlantic’s CityLab.
After returning from China, she continued as a freelance writer. A historian friend told her that if she had ancestors in New York’s Hudson Valley, especially if they were Dutch, they were likely enslavers. Her friend was right. Bruno hadn’t known about New York’s 200 years of enslavement and was stunned to realize that her small hometown of Athens held so many hidden stories. Even more powerfully, she connected with Eleanor Mire, whose ancestors had been enslaved by Bruno’s ancestors.
That story first appeared as a 2020 article in the Washington Post Magazine, drawing a wave of attention and allowing her to tell those stories for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Here and Now.”
Her book, A Hudson Valley Reckoning, is an expansion of the Post article and includes an afterword by Mire. It was published by Cornell’s Three Hills imprint on October 15, 2024. Copies will be available for purchase at the event.