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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Jeff Forret, "William’s Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: Jeff Forret is the author of William’s Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. William’s Gang explores the career of prominent slave trader William H. Williams, whose operation was based in Washington D.C. His infamous Yellow House slave pin was a major stop in the domestic slave trade. Forret examines Williams’s life as a slave trader, and particularly the legal troubles he found himself in when he was accused of trying to sell twenty-seven enslaved convicts, from Virginia, in Louisiana. The myriad of courtroom battles Willia...