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Traces the maritime routes and the historical networks that link port cities around the Atlantic world

Port Cities of the Atlantic World brings together a collection of essays that examine the centuries-long transatlantic transportation of people, goods, and ideas with a focus on the impact of that trade on what would become the American South. Employing a wide temporal range and broad geographic scope, the scholars contributing to this volume call for a sea-facing history of the South, one that connects that terrestrial region to this expansive maritime history. By bringing the study up to the 20th century in the collection's final section, the editors Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott make the case for the lasting influence of these port cities—and Atlantic world history—on the economy, society, and culture of the contemporary South.

University of South Carolina Press

Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World

Port Cities of the Atlantic World: Sea-Facing Histories of the US South

A collection of essays that examine how the history of slavery and race in the United States has been interpreted and inserted at public historic sites

For decades racism and social inequity have stayed at the center of the national conversation in the United States, sustaining the debate around public historic places and monuments and what they represent. These conversations are a reminder of the crucial role that public history professionals play in engaging public audiences on subjects of race and slavery. This "difficult history" has often remained un- or underexplored in our public discourse, hidden from view by the tourism industry, or even by public history professionals themselves, as they created historic sites, museums, and public squares based on white-centric interpretations of history and heritage.

Challenging History, through a collection of essays by a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, examines how difficult histories, specifically those of slavery and race in the United States, are being interpreted and inserted at public history sites and in public history work. Several essays explore the successes and challenges of recent projects, while others discuss gaps that public historians can fill at sites where Black history took place but is absent in the interpretation. Through case studies, the contributors reveal the entrenched false narratives that public history workers are countering in established public history spaces and the work they are conducting to reorient our collective understanding of the past.

History practitioners help the public better understand the world. Their choices help to shape ideas about heritage and historical remembrances and can reform, even transform, worldviews through more inclusive and ethically narrated histories. Challenging History invites public historians to consider the ethical implications of the narratives they choose to share and makes the case that an inclusive, honest, and complete portrayal of the past has the potential to reshape collective memory and ideas about the meaning of American history and citizenship.

Challenging History: Race, Equity, and the Practice of Public History

T. J. Desch-Obi

A groundbreaking investigation into the migration of martial arts techniques across continents and centuries

The presence of African influence and tradition in the Americas has long been recognized in art, music, language, agriculture, and religion. T. J. Desch-Obi explores another cultural continuity that is as old as eighteenth-century slave settlements in South America and as contemporary as hip-hop culture. In this thorough survey of the history of African martial arts techniques, Desch-Obi maps the translation of numerous physical combat techniques across three continents and several centuries to illustrate how these practices evolved over time and are still recognizable in American culture today. Some of these art traditions were part of African military training while others were for self-defense and spiritual discipline.

Grounded in historical and cultural anthropological methodologies, Desch-Obi's investigation traces the influence of well-delineated African traditions on long-observed but misunderstood African and African American cultural activities in North America, Brazil, and the Caribbean. He links the Brazilian martial art capoeira to reports of slave activities recorded in colonial and antebellum North America. Likewise Desch-Obi connects images of the kalenda African stick-fighting techniques to the Haitian Revolution. Throughout the study Desch-Obi examines the ties between physical mastery of these arts and changing perceptions of honor.

Including forty-five illustrations, this rich history of the arrival and dissemination of African martial arts in the Atlantic world offers a new vantage for furthering our understanding of the powerful influence of enslaved populations on our collective social history.

Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Arts in the Atlantic World

An international comparative study of a mode of emancipation that worked to reinforce the institution of slavery

Manumission—the act of freeing a slave while the institution of slavery continues—has received relatively little scholarly attention as compared to other aspects of slavery and emancipation. To address this gap, editors Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks present a volume of essays that comprise the first-ever comparative study of manumission as it affected slave systems on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this landmark volume, an international group of scholars consider the history and implications of manumission from the medieval period to the late nineteenth century as the phenomenon manifested itself in the Old World and the New. The contributors demonstrate that although the means of manumission varied greatly across the Atlantic world, in every instance the act served to reinforce the sovereign power structures inherent in the institution of slavery. In some societies only a master had the authority to manumit slaves, while in others the state might grant freedom or it might be purchased. Regardless of the source of manumission, the result was viewed by its society as a benevolent act intended to bind the freed slave to his or her former master through gratitude if no longer through direct ownership. The possibility of manumission worked to inspire faithful servitude among slaves while simultaneously solidifying the legitimacy of their ownership.

The essayists compare the legacy of manumission in medieval Europe; the Jewish communities of Levant, Europe, and the New World; the Dutch, French, and British colonies; and the antebellum United States, while exploring wider patterns that extended beyond a single location or era. They also document the fates of manumitted slaves, some of whom were accepted into freed segments of their societies; while others were expected to vacate their former communities entirely. The contributors investigate the cultural consequences of manumission as well as the changing economic conditions that limited the practice by the eighteenth century to understand better the social implications of this multifaceted aspect of the system of slavery.

Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World

Examines the economic and cultural development of England's most British colony

Reflecting the burgeoning interest of colonial historians in South Carolina and its role as the economic and cultural center of the Lower South, Money, Trade, and Power is a comprehensive exploration of the colony's slave system, economy, and complex social and cultural life.

The first six chapters of this essay collection focus on the formative decades of South Carolina's history, from 1670 through the 1730s. Contributors Meaghan N. Duff, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, and Gary L. Hewitt explore the colony's early settlement. R. C. Nash, Stephen G. Hardy, and Eirlys M. Barker investigate the rapidly expanding economy.

Turning to the colony's reliance on slave labor, William L. Ramsay analyzes the institution and abandonment of Indian slavery; Jennifer Lyle Morgan examines the reproductive capabilities of slave women; and S. Max Edelson looks at the distinctive social position of skilled slaves. Robert Olwell considers how South Carolina public officials adapted the office of justice of the peace to the needs of a slave society, while Matthew Mulcahy shows how calamities of fires and hurricanes exacerbated the problem of slave control.

Finally, Edward Pearson describes the ways in which South Carolina's emerging elite asserted their new status; G. Winston Lane and Elizabeth M. Pruden review the surprising economic independence of women; and Thomas Little examines the colony's religious life and spread of evangelicalism.

Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society

A collection of essays detailing how individuals remapped race, gender, and sexuality through their lived experiences and in the cultural imagination

For centuries the Atlantic world has been a site of encounter and exchange, a rich point of transit where one could remake one's identity or find it transformed. Through this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Laura R. Prieto and Stephen R. Berry offer vivid new accounts of how individuals remapped race, gender, and sexuality through their lived experience and in the cultural imagination. Crossings and Encounters is the first single volume to address these three intersecting categories across the Atlantic world and beyond the colonial period.

The Atlantic world offered novel possibilities to and exposed vulnerabilities of many kinds of people, from travelers to urban dwellers, native Americans to refugees. European colonial officials tried to regulate relationships and impose rigid ideologies of gender, while perceived distinctions of culture, religion, and ethnicity gradually calcified into modern concepts of race. Amid the instabilities of colonial settlement and slave societies, people formed cross-racial sexual relationships, marriages, families, and households. These not only afforded some women and men with opportunities to achieve stability; they also furnished ways to redefine one's status. 

Crossings and Encounters spans broadly from early contact zones in the seventeenth-century Americas to the postcolonial present, and it covers the full range of the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, North America, and Latin America. The essays examine the historical intersections between race and gender to illuminate the fluid identities and the dynamic communities of the Atlantic world.

Crossings and Encounters: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Atlantic World

The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is a collection of essays focusing on the expansion, elaboration, and increasing integration of the economy of the Atlantic basin—comprising parts of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In thirteen essays, the contributors examine the complex and variegated processes by which markets were created in the Atlantic basin and how they became integrated.

While a number of the contributors focus on the economic history of a specific European imperial system, others, mirroring the realities of the world they are writing about, transcend imperial boundaries and investigate topics shared throughout the region. In the latter case, the contributors focus either on processes occurring along the margins or interstices of empires, or on "breaches" in the colonial systems established by various European powers. Taken together, the essays shed much-needed light on the organization and operation of both the European imperial orders of the early modern era and the increasingly integrated economy of the Atlantic basin challenging these orders over the course of the same period.

The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel

The effect of Saint Domingue's decolonization on the wider Atlantic world

The slave revolution that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity markets to the imagination of poets, from the council chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining legitimacy in an Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and the slave trade. 

The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World explores the multifarious influence—from economic to ideological to psychological—that a revolt on a small Caribbean island had on the continents surrounding it. Fifteen international scholars, including eminent historians David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse ramifications as the spawning of slave resistance and the stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening of economic frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas. They show how the Haitian Revolution embittered contemporary debates about race and abolition and inspired poetry, plays, and novels. Seeking to disentangle its effects from those of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact was ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.

The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World

An interdisciplinary exploration of the influence of physical space in the study of religion

While the concept of an Atlantic world has been central to the work of historians for decades, the full implications of that spatial setting for the lives of religious people have received far less attention. In Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, John Corrigan brings together research from geographers, anthropologists, literature scholars, historians, and religious studies specialists to explore some of the possibilities for and benefits of taking physical space more seriously in the study of religion.

Focusing on four domains that most readily reflect the importance of Atlantic world spaces for the shape and practice of religion (texts, design, distance, and civics), these essays explore subjects as varied as the siting of churches on the Peruvian Camino Real, the evolution of Hispanic cathedrals, Methodist identity in nineteenth-century Canada, and Lutherans in early eighteenth-century America. Such essays illustrate both how the organization of space was driven by religious interests and how religion adapted to spatial ordering and reordering initiated by other cultural authorities.

The case studies include the erasure of Native American sacred spaces by missionaries serving as cartographers, which contributed to a view of North America as a vast expanse of unmarked territory ripe for settlement. Spanish explorers and missionaries reorganized indigenous-built space to impress materially on people the "surveillance power" of Crown and Church. The new environment and culture often transformed old institutions, as in the reconception of the European cloister into a distinctly American space that offered autonomy and solidarity for religious women and served as a point of reference for social stability as convents assumed larger public roles in the outside community. Ultimately even the ocean was reconceptualized as space itself rather than as a connector defined by the land masses that it touched, requiring certain kinds of religious orientations—to both space and time—that differed markedly from those on land.

Collectively the contributors examine the locations and movement of people, ideas, texts, institutions, rituals, power, and status in and through space. They argue that just as the mental organization of our activity in the world and our recall of events have much to do with our experience of space, we should take seriously the degree to which that experience more broadly influences how we make sense of our lives.

Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World

Michael D. Thompson

An examination of the role and struggles of dockworkers—enslaved and free—in Charleston between the American Revolution and the Civil War

Working on the Dock of the Bay explores the history of waterfront labor and laborers—black and white, enslaved and free, native and immigrant—in Charleston, South Carolina, between the American Revolution and Civil War. Michael D. Thompson explains how a predominantly enslaved workforce laid the groundwork for the creation of a robust and effectual association of dockworkers, most of whom were black, shortly after emancipation. In revealing these wharf laborers' experiences, Thompson's book contextualizes the struggles of contemporary southern working people.

Like their postbellum and present-day counterparts, stevedores and draymen laboring on the wharves and levees of antebellum cities—whether in Charleston or New Orleans, New York or Boston, or elsewhere in the Atlantic World—were indispensable to the flow of commodities into and out of these ports. Despite their large numbers and the key role that waterfront workers played in these cities' premechanized, labor-intensive commercial economies, too little is known about who these laborers were and the work they performed.

Though scholars have explored the history of dockworkers in ports throughout the world, they have given little attention to waterfront laborers and dock work in the pre-Civil War American South or in any slave society. Aiming to remedy that deficiency, Thompson examines the complicated dynamics of race, class, and labor relations through the street-level experiences and perspectives of workingmen and sometimes workingwomen. Using this workers'-eye view of crucial events and developments, Working on the Dock of the Bay relocates waterfront workers and their activities from the margins of the past to the center of a new narrative, reframing their role from observers to critical actors in nineteenth-century American history. Organized topically, this study is rooted in primary source evidence including census, tax, court, and death records; city directories and ordinances; state statutes; wills; account books; newspapers; diaries; letters; and medical journals.