The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Renaissance Literature Seminar will host a meeting with Brooke Newman, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Saturday, April 11, 2026.

Professor Newman is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with current special interest in the history of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British royal family. She will discuss her new book, The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas (Mariner, January 2026). It's the first work to trace, in forensic detail, the monarchy's links to the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery across four centuries. From the 1560s to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the British monarchy invested in slaving ventures and built an Atlantic empire on the forced labor of millions of Africans. The Crown continued to profit from African bondage well into the nineteenth century--even as Britain crowned itself the leader of the global abolition movement.

All EMSI events are free and open to the public.