Joanna Brooks will join East Side Freedom Library in partnership with Ramsey County Libraries and Norway House for a presentation of her book Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants on Thursday, May 16 at 7:00 p.m. This event is free and open to the public but requires advance registration here.

Why We Left reveals the dislocation, violence, and deforestation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, offering a powerful restorying of the journey to our present moment of precarity and rootlessness. Following American folk ballads back across the Atlantic, Joanna Brooks shares a scholarly and personal account of the intergenerational traumas that shape the history of white Anglos on Turtle Island.

"A remarkable achievement, Why We Left is a story of the grim costs of modernity that left remnants in cultural artifacts—a fascinating journey through unique and creative readings into the lives of the early Anglo-American poor, indentured servitude, the Atlantic world, balladry, and the personal upheavals wrought by the earliest pushes of European colonialism." —The Register

"Why We Left draws creatively on early folk ballads of England and America to make a surprising, bold, and altogether brilliant contribution to our understanding of why people crossed the Atlantic to live in a strange new world. Haunting voices sing to us across the centuries a rich and disturbing ‘history from below.’" —Marcus Rediker, author of The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

"Joanna Brooks compellingly recreates the lives of British peasants who came to the New World.  She traces their collective memories through the folk ballads sung by their descendants and collected diligently by scholars and revivalists. Riveting, harrowing, Why We Left will forever change the way we listen to ‘folk music.’" —Charles McGovern, College of William and Mary