Atlantic Black Box is a public history project that empowers communities throughout New England to take up the critical work of researching and reckoning with our region’s complicity in the slave trade and the broader slave economy. This grassroots historical recovery movement is powered by citizen historians and guided by a broad coalition of scholars, community leaders, archivists, museum professionals, antiracism activists, and artists.
On February 25, 2021 at 7:00 p.m., the project’s creator’s will discuss the origins of the project, finding collaborators, and why this important work is as necessary now as ever. Sponsored by the McGillicuddy Humanities Center as part of their ongoing mission to support the digital and public humanities. Free and open to the public with registration. Register here to get the Zoom link.
More about Atlantic Black Box’s creators:
Dr. Meadow Dibble: Meadow Dibble is a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. She received her PhD from Brown University’s Department of French Studies and taught at Colby College from 2005–08. Today, she is editor of The International Educator newspaper. In 2018, following a brutal awakening to the reality of her hometown’s deep investment in the business of slavery, she launched Atlantic Black Box, a public history initiative devoted to researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the slave trade.
Dr. Kate McMahon attended the University of Southern Maine for both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and completed her Ph.D. in History at Howard University in May 2017. Her dissertation, The Transnational Dimensions of Africans and African Americans in Northern New England, 1776–1865, explores the complexities of the shipbuilding economies of northern New England, their connections to the slave trade, and how Africans and African Americans resisted slavery and racism. Her current research agenda focuses on the connections between northern New England and the illegal slave trade to Brazil and Cuba, ca. 1830-1850.