Exhibition Opening Weekend:

Bodies of Information: Understanding Slavery through the Stearns Collection

October 1, 2021 – January 4, 2022

Bodies of Information: Understanding Slavery through the Stearns Collection explores how archives help us tell nuanced stories of slavery. The exhibit features select items from the Stearns Collection, an 87-piece collection spanning more than 100 years, painstakingly collected by Herbert Stearns. Through this exhibit we can examine how people – from researchers, educators, and historians to students and family genealogists – use documents to confront the complicated role that slavery played in American life. By looking closely at the newspapers, images, ads, and bills of sale from the period, we see how slavery existed in every part of life in the United States.