Phillis Wheatley’s Lost Years

She didn’t go far from Boston, but a keen-eyed historian glimpsed her in the archive—and that find opens up a door to both the poet’s marriage and the final years of slavery in Massachusetts

In September 2021, University of Connecticut historian Cornelia Dayton broke the news that three “lost” years of African American poet Phillis Wheatley had been accounted for: the first three years of her marriage to John Peters, a free Black New Englander who she married in 1780. In an article published ...
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Phillis Wheatley’s Lost Years