November 2006 | Back to News
A session at the annual Slavery & Public History symposium, held November 2-4, 2006, at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Yale University
For the Gilder Lehrman Center's eighth annual international conference, Jane Clark Chermayeff reflected on nearly twenty-five years of experience in Puerto Rico. Two projects in particular demonstrated how public remembrance of slavery has developed there. At Hacienda Buena Vista, discussions in the 1980s about how to interpret slavery at the former coffee plantation were strained and inconclusive. Twenty years later, scholars considering plans for exhibitions about slavery at Hacienda La Esperanza energetically embraced the subject as central to contemporary experience of the place.
Other speakers at the Slavery & Public History symposium included Lonnie Bunch III of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African-American History and James Oliver Horton, co-author of Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory.