A Nation of Plantations

Among the wrongs that took place in the United States of America, slavery will never cease to be highlighted. Many slaves were entrapped upon plantation land, driven to work for families and slavemasters in difficult conditions. Among the National Park (and other historical) sites that remember these location is the Hampton National Historic Site in Maryland.

A report in 2020 entitled “Tracing Lives in Slavery: Reclaiming Families in Freedom, an Ethnographic Solution to a Historical Problem” undertook a deep dive into an until-then forsaken history of the slaves and conditions at the Hampton Plantation. The research and presentation of this report is a small step in continuing to understand the development of our social networks and relationships to historic people groups in the United States.