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President Obama’s recent visit to Ireland inspired a new wave of interest in the international experiences of formerly enslaved African American Frederick Douglass. He travelled to Britain in 1845 and spent the first few months of his trip gaining support from Irish audiences in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast, to name a few of the cities he visited.
The Southampton Rebellion remains the most famous slave rebellion in American history. It was not the largest or even the first. From the hinterlands of the African continent to the plantations of the New World, rebellion and resistance on the part of enslaved African Americans was common, persistent, and widespread.
Cornelia Dayton and Sharon Salinger’s Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston describes the efforts of one man on Boston’s city payroll who was tasked with locating non-resident transients in the city, inquiring into the origins of hundreds of arriving strangers between 1765 and 1774.
Most canonical interpretations of the American Civil War revolve around some facet of the great national contest over the status and future of slavery in the western territories.
Over the last three decades, histories of popular politics in Latin America have proliferated. It is not hard to understand why. Elections and liberalism loomed large in the present, and so their history began to assume more importance. Larger trends in the discipline reinforced the shift, as historians tipped the interpretive scales away from socio-economic structures and towards agency.
In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Anthony McFarlane talks to Felipe Fernandez-Armesto about his new book, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto (born 1950) is a British historian and author of several popular works of revisionist history.
Slavery defined the Atlantic world. African forced labour produced the primary materials that drove European mercantile economies. The plantation complex lay at the core of societies from Brazil and the West Indies to the American mainland and West Africa.
This book is a study of the exercise of imperial power in the early modern era and the way authorities at all levels moved, expelled, and transported people within the British Empire. Morgan and Rushton investigate some of the processes by which a wide variety of peoples under many different circumstances were forcibly moved.
Dr Pak’s important study of investment banking in New York in the first three decades of the 20th century blends financial and social history. This excellent book, which combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, is likely to appeal to some business-school academics and many social historians.
Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800 includes 11 rigorously documented essays addressing a genre that began to attract attention following Susan Leonardi’s 1989 article, ‘Recipes for reading: Summer pasta, lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie’.(1) The editors, Michelle DiMeo and Sarah Pennell, seek to demonstrate how far the study of medical/culinar