African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
340 p., Sailing the tide of a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Reconstructs the lives of unique individuals who managed to move purposefully through French, Spanish, and English colonies, and through Indian territory, in the unstable century between 1750 and 1850. Mobile and adaptive, they shifted allegiances and identities depending on which political leader or program offered the greatest possibility for freedom.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
239 p., From 1791 to 1804, revolution on the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue sent thousands of free and enslaved people of African descent to the United States. Historians have largely viewed this migration as contributing to black community formation in cities like Philadelphia, and as evidence of revolutionary connections in an Atlantic World. This dissertation examines the experiences of these migrants as an example of competing identities among people of African descent, and argues that the emergence of an ethnic identity among black Saint-Dominguans, shaped by Roman Catholicism and French language, impeded assimilation into African-American communities.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
326 p., Shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p, In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
214 p, The writings of the Hart sisters illuminate the complex of racial, spiritual, and class- and gender-based divisions, as well as attitudes, of Anglophone Caribbean society. (Books in Print);
Bigelow,John (Author) and Scholnick, Robert J. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2006
Published:
Urbana: University of Illinois Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published: New York & London : Putnam, 1851., 214 p, After Jamaican slaves were fully emancipated in 1838, the local economy collapsed. Driven by a belief in the innate inferiority of the black race and bolstered by this apparently disastrous Jamaican example, Americans who defended slavery convinced many that emancipation at home would lead to economic and social chaos. Collecting John Bigelow's vivid firsthand reporting, Jamaica in 1850 challenges that widely held view and demonstrates that Jamaica's troubles were caused not by lazy blacks but by the incompetence of absentee white planters operating within an obsolete colonial system.
