Bitter Vines: Wine and Slavery in the United States

A fellow’s forum with Whitney Nell Stewart, Associate Professor of History and Faculty, Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas from July 24, 2024.

About the Presentation

This Fellow’s Forum will focus on the networks of wine knowledge and goods that flowed in early America, in particular looking at how slavery shaped the possibilities and realities of an American wine industry before the Civil War. Enslaving southerners were at the forefront of the campaign to establish a profitable commerce in wine, and their plantations were the sites of innumerable attempts to realize it using enslaved and indentured labor. The why and how of it changed over time; environmental, scientific, political, economic, and cultural developments gave the quest for American wine a different flavor from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. And while failure was frequent, hope remained constant. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson—who was at the center of it all—never gave up on a wine industry of and for the United States. Jefferson will thus serve as our guide, introducing the ideas, practices, people, and bottles that entwined American wine with American slavery.

About Whitney Nell Stewart

Whitney Nell Stewart is a historian of slavery and the American South. Along with several articles and essays, she is author of This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations, which won the 2024 Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Work from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has been supported by fellowships from national organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian, and most recently by the Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast, the George Washington Presidential Library, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies. She received her PhD from Rice University and is an assistant professor of history and faculty of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas.