Writer, Storyteller, Historian
I am an award-winning writer and historian fascinated by the enduring power of stories to shape and reshape our world.
Winner of the 2023 Hendricks Award, Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry is available now. Check it out at Cornell University Press, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or at your favorite bookseller. See a free preview here:
I am an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and a former Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow and Director of Public History. I specialize in the colonial history of the Northeast, with a focus on overlapping networks of slavery in the Dutch and British Atlantic worlds.
My book, Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, published by Cornell University Press, compares the ways that slavery shaped Northeastern culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved. It is the winner of the 2023 Hendricks Award from the New Netherland Institute.
My article, “‘Here Lyes the Body of Cicely Negro’: Enslaved Women in Colonial Cambridge and the Making of New England History,” published in the New England Quarterly, is the winner of the 2023 Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize from the Coordinating Council for Women in History.
I have appeared on CSPAN, the podcast Ben Franklin’s World, and in an award-winning documentary film about the life and legacy of Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse, an early female trader and enslaver. I am currently a series editor for Black New England, an upcoming University of Massachusetts Press book series that highlights original and innovative research on the history of African-descended people in New England from the colonial period through the present day.
I am a native of Oak Park, Illinois, and a 1998 graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory High School. I received my AB cum laude from Harvard College in 2002 and, after time in the private sector, began my graduate studies under the principal advisement of Mary Beth Norton at Cornell University in 2007. I received my MA in 2010 and PhD in 2013.
My current research interests include Early America, Dutch, and British Atlantic Worlds, Atlantic slavery, and African and African American Diasporas.
CV available upon request
Long before I became a historian, I was a girl interested in the stories my family members told about their past. My grandparents retold our ancestors’ stories of escape and slavery, mingled with their own experiences as sharecroppers and entrepreneurs in a segregated society. My mother’s stories were of friendships in English, French, and Creole, of coming of age as an ex-pat black woman in France in the sixties. My father detailed his own migration from the deep south to Chicago, of life in the projects, and escape through Olympic weightlifting and a passion for science. The enduring power of narrative has shaped my own interest in history and the ways that we make sense of the world.
This lecture focused on the ways that slavery shaped Hudson River Valley culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved in the region and throughout the Northeast. This annual lecture series was established through the generosity of community leaders Shirley and Bernard Handel and Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert A. …
Who was Margaret Philipse and why should we know her story? Discover the biography of this forgotten New York power broker as scholars Dennis Maika and Nicole Maskiell share the surprising history of women in New Amsterdam and reveal the complicated truth about New York’s founding families and the legacy they left behind at Historic …
Continue reading “A Colonial Trading Woman: Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse”
African chattel slavery, the predominant type of slavery practiced in colonial North America and the early United States, did not represent one monolithic practice of slavery. Practices of slavery varied by region, labor systems, legal codes, and empire. Slavery also wasn’t just about enslavers enslaving people for their labor. Enslavers used enslaved people to make …
This roundtable explores how family history and genealogy can be used to gain a deeper understanding of “Vast Early America” through the lives of the varied peoples who inhabited it. As a concept, Vast Early America decenters narratives focusing solely on Anglo-American colonial origins to better historize the many peoples who comprised and contested early America’s diverse geographies. This panel contends the field is further enriched through the study of families and family history. Throughout early America, genealogy and family networks proved highly important. Kinship was often carefully recorded in notarial, sacramental, judicial, and personal records, revealing how relationships were both reinforced and displaced through trade, communication, gift giving, intermarriage, and enslavement. While this research proves more challenging for those whose family histories were disrupted or genealogies unpreserved, focus on the interconnectivity of historical actors and their communities also proves crucially important to reconstructing what has been lost. An in-depth exploration of these connections provides a deeper and more nuanced understanding of early America.
Roundtable participants will discuss the various ways in which they use genealogy and family history to study these connections. Focusing on seventeenth-century Mexico, Danielle Terrazas Williams discusses how Agustina de Acosta, a free parda in central Veracruz, secured a legacy of relative comfort for her daughter and other family members, underscoring the methodological and theoretical value of tracing the biographical notes about individual women. Andrea Mosterman explores the importance of genealogical recordkeeping for New Netherland’s first enslaved families. But by the eighteenth century, Dutch descendants no longer recorded such information for the people they enslaved, purposefully disconnecting them from their kin in the records they produced. Karin Wulf discusses how diverse British Americans recorded and researched their family histories. In doing so, she shows the foundational importance of family and family history throughout British America. Jared Hardesty uses genealogical research on the affluent New England Mackintosh sisters to explore the deeply interconnected histories of slavery, property holding, and family formation in the early modern Atlantic. Leila K. Blackbird examines how family history can serve as a tool of repair for the descendants of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous people who were enslaved in Louisiana’s French and Spanish periods, as well as for tribal nations that have been denied federal recognition in the Gulf South.
Bringing together historians studying early America in all its vastness, this roundtable explores the importance of family history and genealogy, and it seeks to address three questions: First, how does centering family history in the study of early America change how scholars consider the field? Second, how can the inclusion of genealogical research change our understanding of places, people, and phenomena that have been long studied? And finally, what does studying early American genealogical records reveal about the importance of kin, clans, and connections in communities? These questions will allow the panel to have a wide-ranging conversation about and encourage audience participation in an important conversation in the historiography of Vast Early America.
Chair & Moderator: Nicole Maskiell
Click here to register for the conference and here to learn more about the Saturday, January 6, 2024 presentation in San Francisco, California.
In 1974, Peter H. Wood published Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion, a pioneering work that presaged a generation of innovative scholarship on African American history. Fifty years later, W.W. Norton is reissuing an anniversary edition of the book, with a new Introduction by Imani Perry. In this roundtable, Wood joins five young Black scholars to discuss the past and future of African American historiography. Wood observed in Black Majority that over the course of his research, “it became increasingly clear that the role of the black majority was major rather than minor, active rather than passive.” African Americans, he wrote, “played a significant and often determinative part in the evolution of the colony.” Much of the social history that followed drew on Wood’s insights. Since then, the field has evolved in significant ways. It is now transnational; it has incorporated women’s and gender studies; and it has experimented with genre and pushed beyond archival documents written by white hands.
At the same time, the nation’s politics have changed. The Second Reconstruction inspired much of the social history of the 1970s. Black Lives Matter now calls for another reckoning with the nation’s long, terrible history of slavery and Jim Crow. As historians learn from Black Lives Matter, what new directions might they pursue in their research? What new questions might they ask? And what can they learn from the previous fifty years of historiography and from Black Majority?
Noted Black poet and New Yorker Jupiter Hammon had an apple orchard, which served as an important source of retirement income for the poet in later years. Surrounding Jupiter’s orchard were other fruit trees intended by his enslaver, Herny Lloyd II, to supply the Charles Town market with cider. The Lloyds did not just send apples down to the markets of Charlestown but human beings. Numbers have always haunted the study of Northeastern enslavement. Many early arguments hinged around the small numbers of African-descended people relative to places like the Lowcountry, as a reason to look elsewhere for exploration of African culture. Recently, such assumptions have changed although the region’s connection to the broader enslaved world has become the chosen way of incorporating a Black minority into the Black majority. In this paper I will explore the impact of the Barbadian-Carolina connections highlighted by Wood, beyond the island and the Lowcountry, focusing on the lives and expansive networks of enslaved and free African-descended Northeasterns. First, I will foreground the connections between the story of an enslaved Cooper named Caesar on Livingston Manner in upstate New York and the South Carolina trading firm Yeamons & Escott, during the tumultuous years of slave rebellion in South Carolina and slave conspiracy in New York. I will also explore the story of Jupiter Hammon, the first published black poet in America, and explain how his long life in the Northeast was impacted by the enduring connection between Barbados and Carolina. The Hammon family is unique because their lives are discoverable in a wide number of sources, a trajectory that can be traced from West Africa, Barbados, and across colonial lines to Long Island.
Chair & Moderator: Alexander X. Byrd, Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Rice University
Click here to register for the conference and here to learn more about the Sunday, January 7, 2024 presentation in San Francisco, California.
Two similar inscriptions eulogize the lives of Cicely and Elizabeth. Both lived and died in the shadow of Harvard College. Both were memorialized by their relation to the same man: the Reverend William Brattle. In appearance, their grave markers are strikingly similar—slate tombstones crowned with identical death’s heads flanked by cascading fruits and vines. Such similarities give way to one startling difference. Cicely was enslaved by the Brattles. In contrast, Elizabeth lived her life as a member of a larger network of Northeastern women linked by kinship, friendship, and business dealings to the larger Atlantic slaveholding world. Her marker is embedded within the north-facing red brick wall of the Brattle family altar-style tomb. Yet Elizabeth Brattle’s female network remains hidden as well, passingly referenced in Samuel Sewall’s diary. Her body was borne to the Cambridge burial ground by the elite of the colony: Harvard Presidents, Fellows, Ministers, and Merchants. They were followed, according to Samuel Sewall, by “the women.”
Gender and slavery have inspired nearly a half-century of research, guiding diverse scholarly narratives ranging from the lasting cultural impact of colonial warfare to the rise of the prison industrial complex. Although it was a coterie of mainly elite, church-going, colonial European women, whose erasure from early American history inspired Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s oft-repeated quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” these same women’s simultaneous involvement in slavery remains under-examined. In a previous article, I analyzed Cicely’s marker as a way into uncovering the broader enslaved community that at first glance is wholly erased from the landscape. In this paper, I will explore how foregrounding material artifacts and hidden landscapes of slavery can uncover unexpected histories of New England’s female enslavers.
Chair & Comment: Terri Snyder, California State University, Fullerton
Click here to learn more about the Friday, October 27, 2023 conference in Williamsburg, Virginia.
In keeping with the theme of this year’s conference, entitled “Get a Sense of New Netherland: Approaching the Dutch through Sight, Sound, Taste, and Touch,” this lecture focused on the soundscapes encountered by early colonists and enslaved people in New Netherland.
Click here and here to learn more about the Saturday, October 7, 2023 presentation at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York.
This lecture focused on the ways that slavery shaped Hudson River Valley culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved in the region and throughout the Northeast.
This annual lecture series was established through the generosity of community leaders Shirley and Bernard Handel and Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert A. Krom, US Army, Retired, to promote knowledge of, and appreciation for, the rich history of this unique and important region of America.
Click here to learn more about the Thursday, September 9, 2023 presentation at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
“The phrase “Dutch Masters” most frequently conjures images of Vermeer or Rembrandt hanging in international art galleries, their famous canvases immortalizing the wealth, conviviality, and commerciality of seventeenth-century urban life in the Low Countries. My keynote address seeks to evoke another image of “Dutch Masters”: men, women, families, institutions, and companies that held generations of people in perpetual bondage. To be sure, the two images exist on the same continuum: indeed, the Atlantic system of commerce fueled by slavery and the products of slave labor made possible the blossoming of art, literature, and wealth within the Dutch Republic. Thus, mastery shaped the contours of the broader Dutch world – affecting cultural sentiment, the built environment, family, religious and social networks. Dutch colonial masters worked upon a canvas of human suffering, searing their marks – whether the initials of the Dutch West India Company or that of private slaveowners – onto the flesh of those they held in bondage. The violence in the pursuit of gain, and the ensuing ripples of its effect, remain at the heart of my exploration into the enduring importance of the Dutch Atlantic slaveholding diaspora to the development of American enslavement.
But why focus on the Dutch? They were not the most prolific nor the most enduring imperial contenders in the slaveholding marketplace of the Americas. Certainly, many have argued that the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English empires offered a more lasting model for how slavery would be realized and reckoned in the Americas. While the Dutch could not compete with other imperial rivals in terms of colonizer numbers or cash crop outlays, they nevertheless had a crucial impact on the development and legacy of slavery and racism in the Americas and, as such, offer a useful avenue towards grappling with the broad-ranging questions of ownership that shape the conference’s focus. Ultimately, this keynote will focus on how history is excavated and rendered: Who is at the center of historical inquiries and why? How does the archive shape the type of histories that get discussed? How do recent debates over cultural representations and memory reflect an inheritance from earlier centuries?”
Chair: Catrin Gersdorf (Würzburg)
Click here to learn more about the Thursday, June 1, 2023 presentation in Rostock, Germany.
This virtual presentation examines the connections and interconnectedness of early black communities in the Hudson Valley of New York, which were extensive and stretched throughout and beyond the region.
This presentation is presented as part of a free lecture series that puts historical and sociological context to the lived experience of enslaved and freed people is presented by the African American Archive of Columbia County in association with the Columbia County Historical Society.
Click here for more information on the Sunday, May 28, 2003 presentation.
This roundtable aims to expand historians’ understanding of the relationship between northeastern North America and the Caribbean. Moving beyond the parochialism that often still characterizes the scholarship on the northern colonies, it takes stock of the connections to West Indian slavery and provides new perspectives on the provisioning trade, slave trade, absentee plantation ownership, and non-economic relations such as intermarriage and intellectual exchange. Ultimately, examining the northern colonies and their connection to Caribbean slavery better illuminates the entanglements that characterize Atlantic history and allows us to tell a more complete story.
This roundtable brings together American and Canadian historians to examine this phenomenon more holistically. The panelists will use their expertise to address three questions regarding the interconnection of the northern colonies and Caribbean. First, how does centering Caribbean slavery in the study of northeastern North America change how scholars should consider those places? Second, how can the inclusion of sources from the northern colonies and the Caribbean help us better understand Atlantic slavery? How does it affect or change our view of places that have been long studied? Finally, what is next for the scholarship on slavery in the northeastern colonies? Where should scholars turn their attention and what are some possibilities for future research? In the end, these questions will allow the panel to have a wide-ranging conversation about and encourage audience participation in what is an important conversation in the historiography of the early modern Atlantic world.
Nicole Maskiell will discuss the Caribbean footprint of prominent New York slave holding families with roots dating back to the Dutch period, and how ties to Caribbean slave markets shaped their prospects during the long eighteenth century. Such individuals included cousins, Balthazar Stuyvesant (whose father, Petrus Stuyvesant, lost New Netherland to the English in 1664) and Nicholas Bayard of New York City, who invested in slave ships that traveled between the Bight of Benin and Curaçao. Similarly, New York merchant Cornelius Steenwijck who had briefly been governor of New Holland co-owned slaving vessels destined for Curacao and the French Caribbean with Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, the former patron of Rensselaerwijck (in New Netherland). Bayard and Steenwijck would go on to become New York mayors, helping erect a legal edifice for slavery there, while the Van Rensselaers, the Stuyvesants, and their Bayard cousins would remain influential into the early nineteenth century.
Click here for more information on the Friday, January 6, 2023 panel.
During the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. In Bound by Bondage, Nicole Saffold Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Dynastic families built prestige based on shared notions of mastery, establishing sprawling manorial estates and securing cross-colonial landholdings and trading networks that stretched from the Northeast to the South, the Caribbean, and beyond. The members of this elite class were mayors, governors, senators, judges, and presidents, and they were also some of the largest slaveholders in the North. Aspirations to power and status, grounded in the political economy of human servitude, ameliorated ethnic and religious rivalries, and united once antagonistic Anglo and Dutch families, ensuring that Dutch networks endured throughout the English and then Revolutionary periods.
Click here to view the Wednesday, October 26, 2022 event.
Click here for more information on the Sunday, October 16, 2022 event.
Explore the lives of the women—Dutch, African, Indigenous, and English—who shaped and built New Netherland and colonial New York in the 17th and 18th centuries. Presented in partnership with the New Netherland Institute, this conference featured two panel conversations and a keynote address inspired by the on-going translation of the papers of Alida Schuyler Livingston (1656-1727), an elite Dutch woman who exerted substantial influence over colonial politics, economics, and diplomacy. Her correspondence with her husband Robert Livingston (1654-1728) represents one of the most significant collections of women’s writing in seventeenth-century North America. Leading historians and scholars used Livingston’s surviving letters, business records, accounts, and documents to unearth the impact of women, including those enslaved by the Livingston family and those indigenous to the region, on the history of the Dutch and later British colony.
Click here for more information on the Saturday, October 1, 2022 event.
In this multi-session, virtual course for educators, participants will investigate trade relationships and power dynamics between the Lenape and Dutch communities in New Amsterdam, examine documents, maps, and artifacts that speak to interactions between Native American nations and early European colonists in the Hudson River region in the 16th and 17th centuries, and consider how the natural environment affected the cultural, economic, and political experiences of those who resided there.
Presentations on April 14, 2022 and October 20, 2022. Click here for more information on the series.
This roundtable addresses the Black history of New England, reflecting on a turn in New England studies that interrogates the region’s entrenched associations with both white racial homogeneity and progressivism, centering instead the experiences and impact of New Englanders of color. Surveying examples from the Colonial period through the early 20th-century, panelists will discuss the role that local and regional history might play in de-colonial, diasporic, and transnational approaches in Black history.
Part of the 2022 OAH Conference on American History. Click here for more information on the Saturday, April 2, 2022 event.
There has been an explosion of research into the lives of the Black inhabitants of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in recent years. This special virtual event, which takes the place of the annual New Netherland Institute Conference, brings together scholars who are at the cutting edge of this work. How did Blacks live in New Amsterdam? What was “slavery” in the colony? When did the first Africans arrive?
Andrea Mosterman, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, will give the keynote address, on the topic of her newly released book, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York. Her talk will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Nicole Maskiell, Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, author of the forthcoming Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry; Jaap Jacobs, Honorary Reader at the University of St. Andrews, author of a soon-to-be-published article about the first Blacks in New Amsterdam; and Debra Bruno, author of a recent Washington Post article about her search for her slave-owning ancestors. The panel will be moderated by Lavada Nahon, culinary and cultural historian.
Sponsored by the New Netherland Institute in Collaboration with the New Amsterdam History Center and the New York State Office of Cultural Education.
Dr. Nicole Maskiell
When traveling with a group from New England to New York in August 1694, Benjamin Wadsworth described the route as a “hideous, howling wilderness,” where they “met a negro coming from Albany; but being very suspicious.” The man, a former soldier from the fort at Albany, was accosted by the group, detained and “pinion’d” but made his escape in the night. Generations later, New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne would conjure an image of Northeastern forests haunted by a diabolical “black man.” Such notions had as much to do about the region’s racial past and antebellum present as they had to do with Puritan cosmologies. Dr. Maskiell will discuss the ways that such stories have shaped her own explorations into the histories of Black Americans in the Northeast.
Open to the public. Visit to view the video from the Thursday, July 29 event.
The Rev. Dr. Iva E. Carruthers, The Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, the Rt. Rev. Eugene T. Sutton, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Dr. Nicole Saffold Maskiell, moderated by Adelle M. Banks
Dr. Nicole Saffold Maskiell & Dr. Andrea Mosterman, moderated by Dennis Maika and Russell Shorto
The Dutch colony of New Netherland had a profound influence on what became New York, yet its significance has been obscured by centuries of myth, misinterpretation, and marginalization. Recently, historical research on New Netherland has exploded, thanks in large part to the translation of thousands of New Netherland documents by Dr. Charles Gehring and Dr. Janny Venema of the New Netherland Research Center at the New York State Library. This renaissance in scholarship has yielded new insights and discoveries, making this one of the fastest growing fields in American studies. The purpose of this seminar is to share the new view of New York’s beginnings with a wider audience, and to explore its influence on later American history.
The seminar will be moderated by Russell Shorto, author of the best-selling Island at the Center of the World and Senior Scholar at the New Netherland Institute, and Dr. Dennis Maika, Senior Historian and Education Director at the New Netherland Institute. The moderators will be joined in each session by other New Netherland historians who will discuss their respective areas of specialization in a lively, engaging format.
Thursday, May 13, 2021 from 10:30 AM to 11:45 AM
Click here for more information and to register
By Dr. Nicole Saffold Maskiell & Conversation with Dr. Jaap Jacobs
Join us for a talk by Dr. Maskiell about the community of black people who were married at Stuyvesant’s chapel in the bowery in the decades following Petrus Stuyvesant’s death, as well as other stories that Dr. Maskiell has compiled about the Stuyvesants, Bayards, their carpenter Frederick Philipse, and the bustling multicultural market nearby as well as those who lived and worked in the village of the bowery. After, Dr. Maskiell and Dr. Jaap Jacobs will engage in a conversation and invite questions.
Dr. Maskiell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina and a Peter and Bonnie McCausland Fellow. She specializes in the colonial history of the Northeast, with a focus on overlapping networks of slavery in the Dutch and British Atlantic worlds. Her book manuscript, Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, under contract with Cornell University Press, compares the ways that slavery shaped Northeastern culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved. Dr. Maskiell hails from the Midwest but has family ties in upstate New York as well as in the Hudson Valley.
Sunday, February 28, 2021 via Zoom from 1:00 PM 2:00 PM
Panel #1 in the Confronting Racial Injustice Virtual Series, hosted by the Northeastern University School of Law’s Criminal Justice Task Force and the Massachusetts Historical Society
“Good Enough to Suckle the Child” – Friday, October 23, via Zoom