Freedom Itineraries : Native and African American Journeys in Revolutionary New England

A pathbreaking study of intertwined Black, Indigenous, and Anglo-colonial communities in revolutionary New England  In this interdisciplinary social and cultural history, historian Christine DeLucia recounts the intertwined lives of Native, African American, and Euro-colonial people in eighteenth-century New England. Offering a dynamic retelling of the familiar years of the American Revolution and its aftermath, DeLucia recovers routes of mobility, resistance, and opportunity from Narragansett Bay to the Piscataqua River, to the streetscapes of New Haven and Newport.  Told through the intersecting stories of the African American family of Newport, Violet, and their son Jacob Freeman, the Native American (Nehantic) family of Ruth and her son Aaron Waukeet, and Ezra Stiles, the prominent colonial minister and later President of Yale College whose own family enslaved, indentured, and dispossessed over many decades, Freedom Itineraries shows how Native and African American families fought to secure their independence, communities, cultures, and homes as they reckoned with the stressful shifts and the searing violence and displacement of the American Revolutionary War.  By refusing to take contemporary colonial writers like Ezra Stiles at their word about Black and Native people and politics of New England, DeLucia helps us imagine a far more complex and contested world, thus also giving an example of how to write inclusive and expansive history.