You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Ben Franklin's world is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

I think if we don't do that work of allowing black people's stories to include that full range of

human experience. I think we end up dehumanizing them again in some other way. Hello and welcome to episode 378 of Ben Franklin's world.

Hello and welcome to episode 378 of Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and

events of our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Covert.

When we study the history of black Americans, especially in the early American period,

we often tend to focus on slavery and the slave trades.

But focusing solely on slavery can really hinder our ability to see that like all early Americans,

black Americans were multidimensional people who led complicated lives,

and lived a full range of experiences that were worth living, and are definitely worth talking about.

Tara Bynum, an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa,

and the author of Reading Pleasures, Black Living in Early America, joins us to explore the lives

of four early American black writers. Phyllis Waitley, John Marant, James Albert Unkeshaw Groniosa, and David Walker.

Now during our exploration, Tarr reveals.

Information about the lives of Wightley, Marant, Groniosa, and

the three-dimensional lives that they led, ways religion influenced the lives and

writings of these four authors, and what brought Phyllis Wheatley, John Marant, James Groniosa, and David Walker

joy, and why their joy is worth considering as we try to better understand the early American

past? But first, have you taken the Ben Franklin's World Listener

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