9780593742341
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The 272 audiobook

  • By: Rachel L. Swarns
  • Narrator: Karen Murray
  • Category: 19th Century, History, United States
  • Length: 9 hours 32 minutes
  • Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
  • Publish date: January 01, 2023
  • Language: English
  • (32 ratings)
(32 ratings)
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The 272 Audiobook Summary

“An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth

In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.

The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape, but the other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’s reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.

Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shining a light on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.

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The 272 Audiobook Narrator

Karen Murray is the narrator of The 272 audiobook that was written by Rachel L. Swarns

About the Author(s) of The 272

Rachel L. Swarns is the author of The 272

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The 272 Full Details

Narrator Karen Murray
Length 9 hours 32 minutes
Author Rachel L. Swarns
Category
Publisher Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date April 27, 2024
ISBN 9780593742341

Subjects

The publisher of the The 272 is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. includes the following subjects: social justice, civil rights, african american books, trauma, history buff gifts, united states history, historical, Rachel Swarns, the 272 book, social science books, race relations, race, biography, history teacher gifts, american history, us history, american history books, Georgetown University, family history, family, reparations, Jesuits, history of the Catholic Church, Catholic, Catholic Church, gifts for history buffs, african american history, african american, slavery, history gifts, history books, history, sociology, History, United States, 19th Century, Social Science, Slavery The BISAC Subject Code is 19th Century, History, United States

Additional info

The publisher of the The 272 is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The imprint is Random House Audio. It is supplied by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The ISBN-13 is 9780593742341.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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