PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Brown University has received a nearly $5 million grant to study historical injustices and the relationship between colonization of America by Europeans and racial slavery, and European taking of Indigenous lands in New England.
The grant to Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice announced this week comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Brown will collaborate on the project with Williams College in Massachusetts and Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut.
The project, called “Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom,” will use maritime history as the foundation.
“A myth in the founding narrative of the United States is the idea of New England as a ‘city on the hill,’ a place founded on the idea of liberty for all,” Anthony Bogues, director of the center, said in a statement.
“But it is important to consider that this site of America’s founding was also a site of Native dispossession as well as racial slavery. Brown and Williams have told stories about both of those histories, but rarely have we explored the relationship between the two.”
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