Ep. 28 - BLACK GOTHAM in THE GILDED AGE
Scott Family from HBO’s THE GILDED AGE - Dorothy Scott (Audra McDonald), Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), Arthur Scott (John Douglas Thompson)
In episode 28 The Boston Sisters talk with CARLA L. PETERSON, author of the 2011 book Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. Professor Peterson’s book served as a resource for the creation of the characters, story, and the Black community in HBO’s THE GILDED AGE.
I think, even to this day, we tend to privilege Southern plantation slavery over the northern urban free Africans…in the 19th century….I wanted to point out that there were free Blacks in the North, in urban cities….I wanted to then focus in on New York State and New York City, which is where my ancestors are from, hence the title “Black Gotham.”
Carla L. Peterson, author, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City
This was a narrative that was quite new to me because I had rather accepted the more usual narrative that the Black population was trying to struggle out of slavery, trying to recover from the persecution of slavery.
Julian Fellowes, creator of THE GILDED AGE - Source: AwardsDaily.com (June 14, 2022)
Guest: CARLA L. PETERSON
Carla L. Peterson is professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a specialist in nineteenth-century African American literary and cultural studies.
Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City. (Source: Yale University Press)
In addition to Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (published in 2011) she has published numerous essays and a second book Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880 (1995).
Carla Peterson is currently at work on a new project, Urbanity and Taste: The Making of African American Modernity in Antebellum New York and Philadelphia.
Purchase Black Gotham and other book titles related to this and past podcasts on the MBGLtd affiliate page on bookshop.org. Your book purchases support independent booksellers and a small commission supports Historical Drama with The Boston Sisters.
THE GILDED AGE
HBO’s THE GILDED AGE Season 1 trailer
Created and written by Julian Fellowes (DOWNTON ABBEY), THE GILDED AGE is set in the year 1882 in New York City. The series dramatizes the tensions between old money New York Society and the new money of the industrial barons who rose to power after the Civil War. Season 1 premiered in January 2022. The release date for Season 2 on HBO is TBA.
Black Gotham and the Black Elite
THE EDUCATION OF PEGGY SCOTT
Denée Benton as Peggy Scott (left). Sarah Mapps Douglass (right), educator, abolitionist, writer, and public lecturer
If Peggy [Scott] went to ICU, the Institute for Colored Youth, which is what she says, the head of the female department, up until the 1870s…was Sarah Mapps Douglass. And she [Douglass] was from a very eminent Philadelphia family whose parents and her parents circle had all been invested in education….She would have been Peggy Scott’s teacher.
Carla L. Peterson
THE REAL ARTHUR SCOTT
Carla L. Peterson’s great grandfather, Philip Augustus White (left photo), is the inspiration for the character Arthur Scott (John Douglas Thompson) in THE GILDED AGE. Philip Augustus White opened his own drug store in lower Manhattan in 1847. Philip Augustus was born free, unlike the character Arthur Scott who was born enslaved and freed when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect January 1, 1863.