This virtual program is part of our Winter Speaker Series, and will be presented on Zoom. A Zoom link will be emailed to all SCHS members before the program.  In her recently published work from Cornell University Press, Professor Nicole Maskiell connects developing Northern networks of merit to the invidious institution of slavery. During the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Professor Maskiell is associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina. She specializes in early American history, with a focus on overlapping networks of slavery in the Dutch and British Atlantic worlds. Her current book project entitled "Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry" compares the ways that slavery shaped the development of elite Northern culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved. Professor Maskiell is a recipient the John Carter Brown, Gilder Lehrman, and Huntington Mayers research fellowships, and her dissertation was nominated for the 2014 Allan Nevins Prize