Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

There is perhaps no greater stain on American history than that of the slave trade.

For over 200 years, millions of African men, women and children were kidnapped from their

homes and enslaved, forced to work on plantations, picking crops like cotton and tobacco for

white owners who did not see them as people.

With those in power, especially in the southern states, enslaved people were simply property.

It was a dark and tumultuous time, a time when the country was still new and finding its

place in the larger world.

Yet despite slavery's wide acceptance, an abolitionist movement brewed among those

who opposed its barbaric treatment of our fellow human beings.

People like Frederick Douglass, sojourner truth, and Harriet Tubman spoke out against the

horrors of slavery, as did many allies such as author Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Quincy

Adams.

Yet there was one abolitionist who did much to further the cause, but despite his theatrical

approach to ending slavery, few people have heard of him today.

So let's change that.

His name was Benjamin Lay, and he was a white man born in Copford, England in 1682.

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