"Revolutionary Perspectives" with Dr. Allegra di Bonaventura

November 19, 2023 · 3 p.m.
Garden House

Our new public program series, “Revolutionary Perspectives,” celebrates innovative approaches to how we discover, interpret, and share American history, with an emphasis on themes of memory and identity.

Dr. Allegra di Bonaventura, associate dean for graduate academic support at Yale University, will discuss her award-winning book, For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England. The book tells the story of two third-generation New Englanders and their interwoven families: Joshua Hempstead, a shipwright, farmer, and magistrate, and Adam Jackson, an enslaved husbandman whom Joshua owned for over thirty years. Hempstead’s remarkable diary – kept from 1711 to 1758 – and one hundred years of court records form the basis of this narrative of family life and enslavement in the colonial North.

di Bonaventura is the Associate Dean for Academic Support at Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Prior to joining the Graduate School, she earned a Ph.D. in History and a J.D. from Yale. Her book For Adam’s Sake won the New England Historical Association’s James P. Hanlan Book Award and the Association for the Study of Connecticut History’s Homer D. Babbidge Award. For Adam’s Sake was named a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year in 2013.

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