Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart (University of Texas, Dallas) joins us to discuss her new book in which she reads the built environment of plantation, considers artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and draws on legal records and plantation owners’ papers to illuminate how slaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners. Homemaking, she reveals, was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.

Stewart Poster