Susan Ryan, who specializes in American literary history and culture, will talk about the river’s signal role as the border between slavery and freedom in the antebellum period--one whose meanings became increasingly opaque as the Compromise of 1850 made even the so-called free states unsafe for fugitives. Using the iconic escape scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which the runaway slave Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio carrying her son, alongside a number of poetic and visual representations that elaborated on or reframed that narrative moment, Ryan shows how antislavery discourse used the river as an emblem of risk and possibility.

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