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Megan Fitzpatrick's avatar

"Imagine Scrabble w 17th century spelling"...the first Dictionary in English spelled alphabetical "Alphabeticall"…anythyng gose!

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Peter Follansbee's avatar

Do I remember correctly that you played scrabble in French?

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Megan Fitzpatrick's avatar

c'est vrai

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robert f. trent's avatar

I was reading the genealogy of the Newbury joiners, and I saw that either Henry Jaques or Stephen Jaques bequeathed a male slave named Jacob to one of his sons, who was supposed to work a set number of years and then be freed. Probably a trained artisan, maybe a foreman. So that means the Jaques furniture may have been partially made by Black labor. Also, when I was doing my thesis fieldwork in 1973, I saw the Job Lane papers, he was a prominent woodworking guy in Haverhill or up that way someplace, one of those "engineer" guys who could build a big warehouse or a meeting house or a mill, sort of like Elderkin, and he had a slave named Ehbedmehareh, or some Arab name like that. It's in my thesis. I'll bet the slave was his foreman on big projects. We know that the shipyards in Bermuda had many skilled Black artisans. So 17C furniture was not quite so much of a dead white man thing as people imagine.

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robert f. trent's avatar

Correction, the slave was an Indigenous person.

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