On September 25, Professor Robin Bernstein joined Matir Asurim to explore connections between her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, the upcoming holiday season, and the work of Matir Asurim. The presentation and discussion were full of insight to inform and inspire work with incarcerated people and around carceral systems generally.
Audio and video recordings, as well as a transcript, are in the works and will be available soon.
Meanwhile, find Freeman’s Challenge, at a nearby library, at your local independent bookstore, or Harvard Bookstore.
NEW: audio book available for those who use Amazon and Audible.
Learn more at Robin Bernstein’s academic home and public page.
See also also Matir Asurim-related Bookshop list
During the discussion, Robin highlighted “13th Forward,” a campaign directly related to the story of Freeman’s Challenge.
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Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit. Robin Bernstein. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2024
In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that made use of incarcerated persons’ labor to manufacture consumer products. Then one young man challenged the system. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Robin Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.
Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who specializes in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Bernstein’s previous book, Racial Innocence:Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards. She has also written a Jewish feminist children’s book, many prize-winning articles, and op-eds and essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues. She recently received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.
Text for graphic: “Event/Resource Update” notice for “The Season of Return & The Carceral State” shows author and book cover plus “New: Audio book now available. Recording and transcript coming soon.” Book cover is red white and blue design showing silhouette of person behind bars. Author is white woman with short styled hair and round-rimmed eye-glasses wearing bright suit jacket and collared shirt
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