Mondays at Beinecke: Science & Slavery at Yale with Eric Herschthal

Eric Herschthal is assistant professor of history at the University of Utah. He is an historian of slavery and abolition in the United States and the wider Atlantic World. His research and teaching interests include 19th century United States history, African American history, the history of science, medicine, and technology, and climate history. His first book, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale, 2021), explores how men of science and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to cast slaveholders as the enemies of science. It challenges the assumption that slaveholders, vis a vis scientific racism, had the upper hand when it came to scientific debates over slavery.

 

Herschthal will discuss Benjamin Silliman, among others, and the ties to slavery and the building of Yale’s scientific culture.