Manisha Sinha, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, will speak on “A Covenant with Death? The Abolitionist Debate over the U.S. Constitution.”
A nationally known expert on slavery, abolitionism, and the Civil War, Sinha will explore how the opponents of slavery in the years before the Civil War debated whether the Constitution supported slavery. This discussion included William Lloyd Garrison’s infamous burning of the Constitution in Framingham on the Fourth of July, 1854.
Sinha has been a contributor to the New York Times “Disunion” blog (as well as the new book from this series) and a commentator to Andrew Deblanco’s Harvard lecture on The Abolitionist Imagination(published last year by Harvard University Press). Her published works include The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina and a forthcoming major book on abolitionism from Yale University Press: The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of American Democracy.
