The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library & Learning Center is hosting Fire and Freedom: Food and Enslavement in Early America, a new six-panel traveling exhibition. Meals can tell us how power is exchanged between and among different peoples, races, genders, and classes. The 18th century collection materials—upon which the exhibition is based—describe connections between food, botany, health, and housekeeping.
The exhibition will be on display for the UT Southwestern community until May 19, 2018. In addition to this physical exhibition, other publicly-available online components include web pages for each of the six panels, higher education class modules, a curator’s bibliography, and a digital gallery.
One of the medical history books listed in the curator’s bibliography—Blanton, Wyndham B. Medicine in Virginia in the Eighteenth Century. Richmond, VA: Garrett and Massie, 1931—is available at the Joint Library Facility and can be requested by UT Southwestern faculty, staff, and students at no cost through Interlibrary Loan. It is also available as an ebook through HathiTrust and can be viewed page by page without logging in; to download the ebook as a PDF for offline reading, simply log in using a UT Southwestern username and password.
The National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health developed and produced this exhibition. Research assistance was provided by staff at The Washington Library at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It was guest curated by Psyche Williams-Forson, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair, American Studies, University of Maryland College Park.