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 | Ten Hills Farm: |
Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ten Hills Farm, a six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston, passed from the Winthrops to the Ushers, to the Royalls--all prominent dynasties tied to the Native American and Atlantic slave trades. In this mesmerizing narrative, C. S. Manegold exposes how the fortunes of these families--and the fate of Ten Hills Farm--were bound to America's most tragic and tainted legacy. Manegold follows the compelling tale from the early seventeenth to the early twenty-first century, from New England, through the South, to the sprawling slave plantations of the Caribbean. John Winthrop, famous for envisioning his "city on the hill" and lauded as a paragon of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in North America condoning slavery. Each successive owner of Ten Hills Farm--from John Usher, who was born into money, to Isaac Royall, who began as a humble carpenter's son and made his fortune in Antigua--would depend upon slavery's profits until the 1780s, when Massachusetts abolished the practice. In time, the land became a city, its questionable past discreetly buried, until now. Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full circle--from concealment to recovery. C. S. Manegold is the author of In Glory's Shadow: The Citadel, Shannon Faulkner, and a Changing America (Knopf). As a reporter with the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, she received numerous national awards and was part of the New York Times team honored with a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. "C. S. Manegold's admirable clarity, dazzling intelligence, and resourceful reporting well serve the story of the North's participation in U.S. slavery. Ten Hills Farm is a feat of historical excavation, and Manegold's contribution to the study of this period of our nation's past is significant."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University "This is an extraordinary, beautifully realized piece of historical writing that tells a powerful story of America and the Atlantic world. In spare and elegant prose, this riveting and wrenching book demolishes so much of the representation of America's founding and development. Ten Hills Farm is quite simply one of the best works of history I've read in a long time."--Steven Hahn, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Nation under Our Feet "This engaging book connects the past with the present. It tells how slavery and slave trading are deeply embedded in the complex colonial beginnings of the United States, and how this has left a legacy of problems related to the effects of race as a dominant factor in American life. The wider world of the Atlantic, within which colonial New England developed, is illuminated with imaginative flair."--David Barry Gaspar, Duke University "The prose of this powerful narrative is vivid and concrete, the engagement with the moral question of slavery unmistakable. Incorporating good sleuthing and lively writing, Ten Hills Farm draws readers in--it tells a good yarn, and tells it well."--Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan Subject Area: | |||||
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