Fireside Chat- Telling the Truth about Authoritarianism: The World-Altering Lives of John Swanson Jacobs

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Thursday, September 18th at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

John Swanson Jacobs’s remarkable 1855 autobiographical emancipation narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery was lost on the other side of the world until Jonathan Schroeder rediscovered and republished it in 2024, accompanied by a full-length biography, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Writing from the other side of the world, beyond the reach of American law and humanitarian authority, John Jacobs—globe-spanning brother of Harriet Jacobs and friend of Frederick Douglass—demonstrates the potential of unfiltered, unapologetic Black writing to speak truth to power. Bringing Despots back to the nation that Jacobs turned his back on gives American readers the best opportunity yet to understand how, when liberated from invisible constraints, African ex-Americans were able to reconfigure the relationship between liberty and truth to call for new, more just worlds. Most remarkably, the second half of the narrative ceases to narrate the autobiographical plot of Jacobs’s life altogether, and instead performs his autobiographical style, with Jacobs writing between the lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in order to underline the vast distance between these founding documents’ rhetoric of liberty and its reality. In reckoning with John S. Jacobs’s world-altering words for the first time, we are forced to ask how, in 1776, this new American nation commenced two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian, literary critic, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. His edition of John Swanson Jacobs’s long lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery, was republished by Chicago in 2024, profiled in the New York Times, All Things Considered, and many other sites, and was the recipient of a 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The recipient of long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, Schroeder is a 2025-26 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where he is completing Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard) and beginning a full-fledged biography of the Jacobs family and their worlds.

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