Mistresses of the Market: White Women and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Slave Trade

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, associate professor of history at University of California, Berkeley, draws upon the testimony of formerly enslaved individuals, the correspondence and account books of slave traders, and a wide range of other material (including travel writing, newspapers and business directories) to show the myriad ways in which white, primarily married, women actively participated in the South's slave market economy, which involved the buying, selling, and hiring of enslaved people. This program is the 2020 Nevins Lecture.