The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum presents Forty Acres & The American Revolution; Stories of Independence & Servitude, a public talk with three leading scholars: Friederike Baer, a historian of 18th-century Hessian soldiers, Marge Bruchac, a scholar of local Indigenous histories, and Charmaine Nelson, director of the Slavery North project at the University of Massachusetts. Together, these scholars expand the narrative of the American Revolution and provide context for the many folks who lived and worked at Forty Acres during the Revolutionary Era, including enslaved, indentured and free persons. The talks will be held in the Museum’s Corn Barn on Sunday, June 29th at 2 pm. The program is free and open to the public.
The accompanying exhibit, Forty Acres & The American Revolution; Stories of Independence & Servitude, commemorates the 250th anniversary of the American revolution by sharing new research on the lives and labor rooted in Hadley through the Revolutionary Era. This exhibit connects those that were enslaved or indentured at Forty Acres to Fort Ticonderoga, the Green Mountain Boys, the Scottish Highlands, Prussia and beyond, widening our view of the Revolutionary battlefield. The exhibit is free, and open to the public Saturday to Wednesday 1pm-4pm through October 2025. Funded, in part, by the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism
Friederike Baer, Professor of History and Division Head for Arts and Humanities at Penn State Abington College, writes about the experiences of German-speaking people in North America from the 1770s to the late nineteenth century. Her most recent book, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022) winner of the 2023 Society of the Cincinnati Prize, examines the experiences of the estimated 30,000 German soldiers – collectively known as Hessians – that were hired by Britain in its effort to put down the American rebellion.
Marge Bruchac, (Nulhegan Abenaki) – in her multi-modal career as a performer, ethnographer, historian, and museum consultant – has long been committed to critical analyses of colonial histories and recoveries of Indigenous histories. Dr. Bruchac is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and founder of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Her 2018 book, Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists (University of Arizona Press, 2018) was the winner of the Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award.
Charmaine Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History and the founding Director of the Slavery North Initiative which supports research on the study of Canadian Slavery and slavery in the American North, and, Editor-in-Chief of Black Maple Magazine. She has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of African Canadian Art History, the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. Her research examines the nature of identity, power relations, resistance, and cultural production within the context of Transatlantic Slavery. She has written about “high” art, “low” art, and popular culture from the eighteenth century to the present, through the lens of the African Diaspora. Her most recent book, Creolization and Transatlantic Blackness: The Visual and Material Cultures of Slavery (2025) considers the ways that art making and cultural production in the period of slavery and its aftermath was irrevocably impacted by the collision of races and cultures in the Americas. In 2022, she was inducted as a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada and elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Universities Art Association of Canada in 2024.
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