Sold in the Free City of New York: The History and Legacies of Slavery in New York City

Catalog description

This new Topics Course will explore how New York City with its beginnings in Lower Manhattan is critically important for studying how the simultaneous development of slavery and freedom evolved in the Northern region of the United States. The course also will study how the slave business decisively contributed to the city’s early growth and national economic dominance by the early nineteenth century. Two key questions will be addressed:1) How did the business of slavery paradoxically develop alongside republican ideals of liberty and equality in in New York City, beginning first in Lower Manhattan? 2) How did enslaved and free Black people manifest agency for survival and building lives in the context of slavery and systemic racism? This course will utilize a place-based, experiential humanities approach to teaching as inquiry-based learning that empowers students to connect the achievements and injustices of Lower Manhattan’s past to their own lived experiences in New York City and beyond. It is an approach defined by content as well as by method. This experiential approach combines established humanities practices of interpretive close reading and contextual analysis with firsthand opportunities to learn in and with NYC institutions and organizations through archives-based undergraduate research, community collaboration, and co-production of public humanities projects. The course subject content and methodology is a contributing course of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) History and Legacies of Slavery Grant awarded to Pace University for 2026. The CIC grant supports Pace collaborations with the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), Black Gotham Experience (BGX), and Humanities New York (HNY) in developing experiential public-facing projects that embed both undergraduate research and civic engagement with community partners…