Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761

This animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire. To teachers and researchers, the presentation offers a carefully curated archive of key documentary evidence. To all viewers, the map suggests an argument about the strategies of the rebels and the tactics of counterinsurgency, about the importance of the landscape to the course of the uprising, and about the difficulty of representing such events cartographically with available sources. Although this cartographic narration cannot be taken as an exhaustive database—for instance, it does not examine major themes such as belonging and affiliation among the insurgents or the larger imperial context and interconnected Atlantic world— the map offers an illuminating interpretation of the military campaign’s spatial dynamics.

See related:

• Vincent Brown

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

California Newsreel
Published on Apr 14, 2009

To watch the entire documentary, to read background information and to order DVDs, visit: http://newsreel.org/video/HERSKOVITS-… A compelling examination of the career of Melville J. Herskovits, the pioneering American anthropologist of African Studies and controversial intellectual who established the first African Studies Center at an American university and authored, “The Myth of the Negro Past.” http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp…

See related:

• Vincent Brown

The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery: Vincent Brown

What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper’s Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America–and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.

In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in Jamaica–belonging and status, dreams for the future, and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes, eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins, and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, “mortuary politics” played a consequential role in determining the course of history.

Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper’s Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.

See related:

• Vincent Brown
• Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761

The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850: Philip D. Curtin

Paperback – Volume I and Volume 2 (1973 paperback edition).

In this encyclopedic work of intellectual history, Philip D. Curtain sought to discover the British image of Africa for the years 1780–1850.

“For the light it sheds on the problems of the new Africa as well as the old, it should be read by everyone concerned with the continent’s affairs”—Africa Report

“Efforts to explain the nature of Africans and their culture led eventually to discussion of race, of origins, of languages, of climate, of Islam, and of biblical interpretations of man’s creation. . . . Scholars will find this monumental study most useful not only for assumptions about Africans and their history, but also for the light cast on such social sciences as anthropology and ethnology, for theories of tropical medicine, and also for its vast bibliographical information.”—Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

See First Edition (1964) – Hardcover:

• The Image of Africa; British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850: Philip D. Curtin

The Image of Africa; British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850: Philip D. Curtin

In this encyclopedic work of intellectual history, Philip D. Curtain sought to discover the British image of Africa for the years 1780-1850.

For paperback 1973 edition see:

 

• The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850: Philip D. Curtin