ONLINE: Conspiracy and Compromise: A Comparative Look at Slavery in Cuba and the United States

press release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program for this lecture on Zoom:

In this webinar, Gerard Aching examines, reflects on, and compares Cuba’s Escalera Conspiracy of 1844, which violently quashed an emerging movement to reform slavery on the island, with the Compromise of 1850 in the United States, which gave rise to the Fugitive Slave Act of the same year. Both events overlap temporally and geographically within the long history of Plantation America. And even though “conspiracy” and “compromise” each represented divergent treatments of the fact of human bondage, they both constituted attempts at managing confrontations between anti-slavery activism and pro-slavery intransigence that brought both societies to the brink of self-destruction.