Brown Univ Talk: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit

Join award-winning historian, Professor Robin Bernstein (Harvard University), for a discussion about her new book, The Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo213968137.html). It’s a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit. Prof. Bernstein will be in conversation with Prof. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Mass Incarceration and Punishment in America Research Cluster Faculty Fellow at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice.Following the event will be book sales and light refreshments.Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who focuses on race and performance from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, as well as Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, which won five awards. Currently the Chair of the Program in American Studies, Bernstein teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She recently won Harvard’s Everett Mendelsohn Award for excellence in mentoring. Find her online at robinbernsteinphd.com (http://robinbernsteinphd.com) or @robinmbernstein.This conversation is a part of the Mass Incarceration and Punishment in America Research Cluster and is made possible by the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice’s Mass Incarceration and Carceral State Projects fund and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.