In addition to the expropriation of lands that belonged to native communities, one of the most consequential outcomes of settler colonialism in the Americas was the invention, speciation, and treatment of enslaved people of African ancestry as subhuman. As a clandestine network of perilous migration routes, the Underground Railroad provided the enslaved with the opportunity to reject their categorization as "human property" and transition to the enjoyment of a freedom that recognized them as fully human. This presentation examines the Underground Railroad as a form of migration that, in challenging the dehumanization of the enslaved, impacted the politics of a United States on the brink of civil war.

Presenter: Gerard Aching, Professor of Africana and Romance Studies and Co-Principal Investigator with the Rural Humanities Initiative, Cornell University

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QXOANWmKRgy9YgKLx3zeEg

Part of the series "Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multi-Species Examination"