Lecture: “Workers, Riders, Owners: African Americans on the Hudson River in the Nineteenth Century”

“Workers, Riders, Owners:  African Americans on the Hudson River in the Nineteenth Century”

Saturday, March 14, 2020 | 2:00 PM | Wooden Boat School Classroom

CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19

$5/person | HRMM Members FREE

Dr. Myra Young Armstead presents an overview of the direct connection of African Americans to the river as laborers on Hudson River docks and on vessels that plied the waters between Manhattan and the Albany area. Charting the experiences of blacks as passengers on the steamboats that operated after 1807, Dr. Armstead will focus on Samuel Schuyler and his descendants, highlighting an African American family of entrepreneurs who established an independent Hudson River steamboat line.

Speaker Bio:

Myra Young Armstead is Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College, where she is also Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence. She is the author of two books -- 'Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August': African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930 (1999) and Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America (2012) -- and the editor of a third volume, Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (2003). Currently, she is completing a book-length study of American cultural reforms in the form of public history projects undertaken during the Progressive Era in New York State and the nation.

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