Spring Lecture: Debra Bruno, New York's Enslaving Past—Memory and Historical Reckoning

Debra Bruno, New York's Enslaving Past—Memory and Historical Reckoning
March 7
1:30 PM
In-Person

Debra Bruno is a longtime Washington journalist and teacher, with a career covering law, politics, the arts, books, culture, health, and international issues. She has worked at Moment Magazine, Legal Times, and Roll Call.

From 2011-2014, she was a freelance writer in Beijing, covering subjects as diverse as expat divorce and post-nuptial agreements for the Wall Street Journal, about rowing in a dragon boat for the Washington Post, and about Chinese hutongs for Atlantic’s CityLab. After returning from China, she learned from a historian friend that if she had ancestors in New York’s Hudson Valley, especially if they were Dutch, they were likely enslavers. She hadn’t known about New York’s 200 years of enslavement and was stunned to realize that her small hometown of Athens held so many hidden stories.

That story first appeared as a 2020 article in the Washington Post magazine and is now a book—A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in my Dutch American Family, published by Cornell’s Three Hills imprint.

Reservations are required to attend in-person lectures. In-person lectures will be held in the Spring Valley Building, 4801 Massachusetts Ave. in room A on the first floor, except for the April 25 lecture, which will be in room 402 on the fourth floor. Registration for the above lecture will open here at 10:00 AM on the Friday prior to the lecture. The direct registration link will also be included in the Friday newsletter the week prior. You must have an OLLI account to register. If you do not have one, you can create an account when going to register. Each registrant may reserve up to two seats. Your name must be on the list of registrants to enter the lecture and you must be in your seat five minutes before the lecture starts to guarantee your seat.