This FREE author event is Wednesday, Nov. 6th from 7:30pm – 9pm at the Miller Center Auditorium at SCSU. The author is an SCSU professor and this book sounds like an informative piece of Minnesota’s history.

From the MN Historical Society website:
“St. Cloud State University Professor Christopher P. Lehman shares his new book, Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders and the North Star State that examines how a set of mutually beneficial relationships between southern slaveholders and Minnesotans kept the men and women whose labor generated the wealth enslaved.

From the 1840s through the end of the Civil War, leading Minnesotans invited slaveholders and their wealth into the free territory and free state of Minnesota, enriching the area’s communities and residents. Dozens of southern slaveholders and people raised in slaveholding families purchased land and backed Minnesota businesses. Slaveholders’ wealth was invested in some of the state’s most significant institutions and provided a financial foundation for several towns and counties. And the money generated by Minnesota investments flowed both ways, supporting some of the South’s largest plantations.

Through careful research in obscure records, censuses, newspapers, and archival collections, Christopher Lehman has brought to light this hidden history of northern complicity in building slaveholder wealth.”

Find more information about the book here, including reviews, author interviews, and purchase information.