From Slavery to Freedom in Colonial Connecticut

Please join us for a webinar with Dr. Nancy Steenburg on the life of Venture Smith: From Slavery to Freedom in Colonial Connecticut. This talk is part of the ongoing series cosponsored by the local initiative, Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford.

Nancy Steenburg will discuss Venture Smith’s life as an enslaved person and how his life’s story and his pathway to freedom were both important examples for other enslaved people in the colony and the State of Connecticut and for white people who questioned the wisdom of abolishing slavery in the State.

Suggested reading

Venture Smith’s Colonial Connecticut by Venture Smith and Elizabeth J. Normen

A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America. Related by Himself (Online copy, housed through University of North Carolina)

Five Black Lives by Arne Bontemps

Complicity: how the North promoted, prolonged, and profited from slavery by Farrow, Lang, and Frank

New England Bound: Slavery and colonization in colonial America by Wendy Warren

Nancy Hathaway Steenburg is currently an adjunct instructor in History at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point. She earned her A.B. in History at Radcliffe College, Harvard University and then went on to earn her Master’s in American History at Trinity College. She pursued her Ph.D. in United States History at the University of Connecticut. She has worked in higher education since returning to school at UConn in 1991 to complete her Ph.D. in history. She served as the Program Coordinator for Maritime Studies and American Studies at UConn’s Avery Point campus; she was the Director for the General Studies program at the Avery Point campus from 2007 to 2020, and the Associate Director for campus advising from 2013 to 2020. She was awarded the UConn Outstanding University Advising Award for 2018-2019.