Before historian David Olusoga’s visit to the Sallis Benny Theatre, you can get a taste for what he will be discussing in his latest BBC episode of Black and British: A Forgotten History.
In the third episode David explored the Victorian moral crusade against slavery. He found out how Queen Victoria came to have a black god-daughter, why the mill workers of Rochdale stood in solidarity with enslaved Africans in the American South, and remembered the victims of a tragedy in Jamaica.
David Olusoga's book is a re-examination of a shared history, published to accompany the landmark BBC2 Black and British series on television this month.
“This book is an experiment. It is an attempt to see what new stories and approaches emerge if black British history is envisaged as a global history and – perhaps more controversially – as a history of more than just the black experience itself."
In Black and British, the award-winning historian and broadcaster offers readers a rich and revealing exploration of the extraordinarily long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to the Afro-Romans who arrived in the British Isles in the third century AD.
Visitors are invited to attend David Olusoga, in conversation with Dr Cathy Bergin, Dr Anita Rupprect, Dr Vedrana Velickovic at the Sallis Benney Theatre tonight, 7–9pm.