We welcome author Carla McClafferty to the bookstore to present and sign her new book, Buried Lives: The Enslaved People of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Join us for an illuminating look at the complex relationships between George Washington and the enslaved people of Mount Vernon, and the history still being uncovered there.

Recommended for readers ages 12 and up.

ABOUT THE BOOK

When he was eleven years old, George Washington inherited ten human beings. His own life has been well chronicled, but the lives of the people he owned–the people who supported his plantation and were buried in unmarked graves there–have not. Using fascinating primary source material and photographs of historical artifacts, Carla McClafferty sheds light on the lives of several people George Washington owned; the property laws of the day that complicated his decision to free them; and the Cemetery Survey, an archeological dig that is shaping our understanding of Mount Vernon’s Slave Cemetery. Poignant and thought-provoking, Buried Lives blends the past with the present in a forward-looking account of a haunting piece of American history.