The next program in the Newtown Authors Reading Series, a collaborative effort between Friends of Newtown Seniors (FONS), CT Humanities (CTH) and C.H. Booth Library, is scheduled for Wednesday, July 19, from 5 to 7 pm.

Town Historian Ben Cruson will be the guest next week. Cruson will host a discussion concerning The Slaves of Central Fairfield County, a 2007 release by his father, the late Dan Cruson.

Copies of the afternoon’s featured title will be provided to the first 20 people to register for the event. Funding for the program and the books is in large part through a grant from CTH received late last year by FONS. FONS has curated the series, which is “designed to promote discussion of history, philosophy, and literary works and to use these works to create a personal connection between the participant and the discipline the author has chosen to explore,” FONS President John Boccuzzi Sr said earlier this year.

Registration is required for Newtown Authors Reading Series programs, and can be done by calling 203-426-4533 or visiting chboothlibrary.org.

Dan Cruson initially published Newtown Slaves, a 1994 booklet he described to The Newtown Bee as “a rural snapshot of slavery in Newtown.”

In March 2007, he then published The Slaves of Central Fairfield County: The Journey From Slave to Freeman in Nineteenth Century Connecticut (History Press, Charleston, S.C.), “a broader picture of northern slavery in central Connecticut, including a look at the social and economic status of the slaves owned in Fairfield County,” Cruson told the newspaper upon the book’s publication.

“New Englanders tend to think of slavery as having been a southern institution, but the truth lies a bit north of those ideas,” he also said that year. While most people today cannot fully understand the mentality of why slaves were owned in the 18th and 19th Centuries, “it is important that we come to understand that people 200 years ago thought differently than we did,” he also shared.

Cruson noted that it was also important for people to understand that the slavery issue was not just a southern issue. In Newtown, Easton, Weston, and Redding, the towns focused upon in his book, prosperous families did own slaves, although in comparison to the southern plantations that relied on slave labor for economic reasons, the one or two slaves for domestic help presented a difference in degree, if not ideology. A few farmers in Connecticut owned perhaps five or six slaves, the 124-page book also notes.

Ben Cruson’s program will be the sixth in a scheduled series of eight presentations.

C.D. Peterson, author of Home Front: A Memoir from WWII, will be the featured guest on August 16; and then John Boccuzzi will offer the final program on September 20, based on One God One Goal.

Registration for those final programs is also required, and already open through chboothlibrary.org.