African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p, Using the stories of ordinary people, Block illustrates how engaging with the powerful rhetoric and rituals of Christianity was central to survival. Isobel Criolla was a runaway slave in Cartagena who successfully lobbied the Spanish governor not to return her to an abusive mistress. Nicolas Burundel was a French Calvinist who served as henchman to the Spanish governor of Jamaica before his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Henry Whistler was an English sailor sent to the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell's plan for holy war against Catholic Spain. Yaff and Nell were slaves who served a Quaker plantation owner, Lewis Morris, in Barbados. Seen from their on-the-ground perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
353 p., Interspersing colonial history with her family's experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery. In examining how these forces shaped her own family--its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin--she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
279 p, Offering a rare pan-Caribbean perspective on a region that has moved from the very center of the western world to its periphery, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism journeys through five centuries of economic and social development, emphasizing such topics as the slave-run plantation economy, the changes in political control over the centuries, the impact of the United States, and the effects of Castro's Cuban revolution on the area.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
710 p, Examines the economic history of the Caribbean in the two hundred years since the Napoleonic Wars and is the first analysis to span the whole region. Its findings challenge many long-standing assumptions about the region, and its in-depth case studies shed new light on the history of three countries in particular, namely Belize, Cuba, and Haiti"
