America’s first experiment with inoculation took place during a smallpox epidemic that raged through Boston in 1721 and 1722. Americans first learned about inoculation from an African slave who taught the technique to his White owner.

The American colonies needed a lot of workers. To meet that need, people were kidnapped from Africa, then sold into slavery and forced to work in America. At the time, many White Americans approved of slavery, even though we recognize it today as one of history’s biggest crimes.

In 1706, no one thought it was weird when a Boston preacher received an African man as a gift from members of his church.

The preacher, Cotton Mather, was a smart, complicated man with some terrible mistaken ideas and also some good ones.

For example, his writings about the supposed threat of imagined witches led to the horrors of the infamous Salem witch trials. Numerous innocent people were falsely convicted of witchcraft and executed.

However, Mather was also very interested in scientific progress. He wrote America’s first popular science book.

Mather was perfectly happy to “own” a human being. He put his slave to work as a household servant. However, Mather seems to have behaved fairly decently toward the man he renamed “Onesimus.” Mather taught his slave to read and write, and later allowed him to marry and earn his own money. Eventually Mather released his slave to “enjoy and employ his whole time for his own purposes, and as he pleases.”