Thursday May 19, 2011 at 5:30pm 
Historian Elaine Forman Crane, scholar and author of A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era, will present an evening lecture featuring her latest research entitled Cold Comfort: Race and Rape in Rhode Island on.
Cold Comfort: Race and Rape in Rhode Island focuses on Cuff, an enslaved man, and Comfort Taylor, a white woman. Cuff was a ferry captain, invested with responsibility. Comfort, the lone passenger crossing a narrow arm of Narragansett Bay on a cold December evening in 1742, claimed that en route, Cuff tried to rape her. Cuff emphatically denied the accusation. Dr. Crane will reconstruct what happened. She will focus on what Cuff and Comfort said, along with analyzing what family, neighbors, and the community said as the tale develops. The central focus of this story is the importance of law and the way it intersected with people’s lives.
This program takes place at the Colony House on Washington Square, the location where the trial that is the subject of this presentation took place. Cold Comfort highlights a chapter in Dr. Crane’s forthcoming book on the legal culture of early America entitled Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America (Cornell University Press, August 2011).
Dr. Crane has authored Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell (Cornell University Press, 2002), Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change 1630-1800 (Northeastern University Press, 1998), and A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (Fordham University Press, 1985). She is the Editor of The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 3 volumes (1991) and the Editor of Early American Studies, an interdisciplinary journal. A Professor of History at Fordham University, Dr. Crane teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses on American constitutional and legal history, the American colonies and Revolution, women’s history and gender roles in America.
A Dependent People, praised by The Journal of American History as “a compelling story,” will be available for purchase at the event and a book signing will follow the presentation. Admission costs $5 per person, $1 for Newport Historical Society members. Reservations requested. Persons with mobility issues should call in advance. 401-841-8770
This program is generously sponsored by
Houlihan, Managhan & Kyle, Ltd.
