Slavery before Race

Hayes makes the most of asking what is within and beyond the patterns other scholars have laid out. Her observations about the politics and culture of public memory involve scholars as agents of forgetting. Readers of Hayes's work will gain specific knowledge of early plantation slavery in the Northeast and also concrete lessons about being better students of the past. -- Susan Kern * William and Mary Quarterly *
Hayes offers a skillful and captivating take on some of the big issues in contemporary historical and anthropological scholarship: race, community, material culture, memory, and heritage. This highly readable book will attract and satisfy archaeologists, historians, and general readers alike, and its thoughtful treatment of New Yorks colonial and 'racial' histories will resonate with researchers of colonialism around the world. -- Stephen W. Silliman,University of Massachusetts, Boston
Under Katherine Hayes's gifted eye, Shelter Island, NY, becomes the grain of sand within which a whole colonial world may be grasped. Skillfully blending archival and archaeological evidence, she shows Sylvester Manor Plantation to be a crucible of bondage in which Algonquians, Africans, and poor whites labored to provision the Atlantic economy even while beliefs about race drove them apart. Long forgotten (or intentionally suppressed), this colonial history speaks to our present as sharply as it clarifies our past. -- James F. Brooks,President, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe
Slavery before Raceshows the potential for archaeology to address the silences in the written record, and vice versa. It calls attention to a curious place in a region once thought to be homogenous, but that upon closer examination seems to have been full of heterogeneous curiosities. It reminds us that accounts of the past are so often overdetermined by present agendas. * American Historical Review *
This is one of the few studies on slavery in northern plantations and specifically plantations of the early New York, primarily before slavery was made into law . . . the author uses historical sources as well as material analysis to push beyond the argument of racial hierarchy on plantations. Instead, she explores the interplay of relationships, politics, social interactions, and identity that demonstrate more give and take and fluidity between the laborers, enslaves or otherwise, Indian and African, and their white owners, who were of Dutch heritage, as well as the members of the community of Shelter Island. * Choice *
Slavery before Race is an important book for students of African slavery, Native American history, and colonial history, as well as those interested in memory and the construction of historical narratives. It forces the historian to confront a number of implicit assumptions about the Northern plantation system, most notably the belief that Native Americans were irrelevant in such contexts. Hayes book also provides a useful corrective to the history of slavery in New York. Historians have long acknowledged and studied the importance of slavery in Dutch New Amsterdam and British New York City, although little has been written about African slavery in other regions of the New York colony.Slavery before Race provides a much-needed addition to the literature on slavery in lower New York. It also challenges the idea of race as a useful method of categorization of colonial laborers in the mid-seventeenth-century North. Finally, Hayes book reminds us that in the construction of historical narratives, what we forget, deliberately or accidentally, is often as important as what we choose to remember. * New York History *
Hayes study demonstrates the necessity of interdisciplinary understanding of historical archaeology, especially when it comes to studying populations underrepresented in the written record.Slavery before Racemakes the case for the persistent need to disentangle race from definitions of culture and community. . . . By drawing out the implications of her study for this contemporary debate, Hayes has reminded historians of race of the immediate importance of their work. * Journal of the Civil War Era *
She carefully dissects how historical memory is constructed, how some events and peoples are & successfully forgotten, and considers how memory functions socially. In her combination or archaeology, anthropology, oral history, and documentary evidence, she reminds readers that combing methodologies often yields a clearer rendering of the past. Hayes ambitious work will find a welcome home with scholars and others interested in community studies, the Atlantic world, early race formation, and memory studies. * Journal of American Ethnic History *
Ms. Hayes, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, approaches the story as someone who took part in the dig, using the artifacts discovered a well as the archival material in what is called historical archaeology to assess the relationship of the Sylvester family with their slaves, and Native Americans. * East Hampton Star *
One gets richly textured history only to the extent that one interrogates the evidence relentlessly and thoroughly, and only when one reassesses the actual data in light of the & official story. Hayes invites us to do that interrogation, and thus her volume is well worth reading, pondering, exploring analogous situations, and then re-reading. * Journal of African American History *