The National Library of Medicine produced Fire and Freedom: Food and Enslavement in Early America, guest curated by historian, author and educator Psyche Williams-Forson, Ph.D. (University of Maryland, College Park). You can view the exhibit on our 3rd floor from January 19 to February 24.
The traveling exhibition and companion website explore how meals can tell us how power is exchanged between and among different peoples, races, genders and classes. In the Chesapeake region during the colonial era, European settlers relied upon indentured servants, Native Americans and enslaved Africans for labor, life-saving knowledge of farming and food acquisition, and to gain economic prosperity. Fire and Freedom looks into life at George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation and the labor of enslaved workers to learn about the ways that meals transcend taste and sustenance.
Fire and Freedom includes an education component with two K-12 lesson plans and a university module. A digital gallery features a curated selection of fully digitized items from the historical collections of the NLM, which are also available in their entirety in NLM Digital Collections.
Additional Resources
- Discover the biographies of the enslaved persons at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate
- Database of Mount Vernon’s Enslaved Community
- Oral histories of Mount Vernon’s Descendants
- Feeding America: the Historic American Cookbook Project at Michigan State University