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thistlewood diary: Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire Trevor Burnard, 2009-11-17 Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain's largest and most valuable slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to maintain its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides unparalleled insight into Jamaica's vibrant but harsh African and European cultures with a comprehensive examination of the extraordinary diary of plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood. Thistlewood's diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in graphic detail how white rule over slaves was predicated on the infliction of terror on the bodies and minds of slaves. Thistlewood treated his slaves cruelly even while he relied on them for his livelihood. Along with careful notes on sugar production, Thistlewood maintained detailed records of a sexual life that fully expressed the society's rampant sexual exploitation of slaves. In Burnard's hands, Thistlewood's diary reveals a great deal not only about the man and his slaves but also about the structure and enforcement of power, changing understandings of human rights and freedom, and connections among social class, race, and gender, as well as sex and sexuality, in the plantation system. |
thistlewood diary: In Miserable Slavery Douglas Hall, 1999 Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) was a British estate overseer and small landowner in western Jamaica. He arrived in Jamaica, the most important of the British sugar colonies in 1750, when he was 29 years old. He became the overseer or manager of the Egypt sugar plantation near the small port of Savanna la Mar. He stayed in Jamaica until his death in 1786. He wrote a diary, which eventually ran to some 10,000 pages, and this diary became an important historical document on slavery and history of Jamaica. |
thistlewood diary: Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 Justin Roberts, 2013-07-08 This book examines the daily details of slave work routines and plantation agriculture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia. Work was the most important factor in the slaves' experience of the institution. Slaves' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on broader pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment for plantation slaves. Many planters increased their slaves' workloads and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement. |
thistlewood diary: Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson Jan Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, 1999 The DNA tests would not have been conducted had there not already been strong historical evidence for the possibility of a relationship. As historians from Winthrop D. Jordan to Annette Gordon-Reed have argued, much more is at stake in this liaison than the mere question of paternity: historians must ask themselves if they are prepared to accept the full implications of our complicated racial history, a history powerfully shaped by the institution of slavery and by sex across the color line. |
thistlewood diary: How to Read a Diary Desirée Henderson, 2019-06-25 How to Read a Diary is an expansive and accessible guidebook that introduces readers to the past, present, and future of diary writing. Grounded in examples from around the globe and from across history, this book explores the provocative questions diaries pose to readers: Are they private? Are they truthful? Why do some diarists employ codes? Do more women than men write diaries? How has the format changed in the digital age? In answering questions like these, How to Read a Diary offers a new critical vocabulary for interpreting diaries. Readers learn how to analyze diary manuscripts, identify the conventions of diary writing, examine the impact of technology on the genre, and appreciate the myriad personal and political motives that drive diary writing. Henderson also presents the diary’s extensive influence upon literary history, ranging from masterpieces of world literature to young adult novels, graphic novels, and comics. How to Read a Diary invites readers to discover the rich and compelling stories that individuals tell about themselves within the pages of their diaries. |
thistlewood diary: The Fortunes of Francis Barber Michael Bundock, 2021-09-28 The story of the extraordinary relationship between a former slave and England's most distinguished man of letters |
thistlewood diary: These Ghosts Are Family Maisy Card, 2020-03-03 PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist Shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A “rich, ambitious debut novel” (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Stanford Solomon’s shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley. And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead. These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of a single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the houseboy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions. This “rich and layered story” (Kirkus Reviews) explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is a “beguiling…vividly drawn, and compelling” (BookPage, starred review) portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret. |
thistlewood diary: A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 John K. Thornton, 2012-09-10 An overview of the history of the Atlantic Basin before 1830, describing interactions between the inhabitants of Africa, Europe and North and South America. |
thistlewood diary: The King’s Peace Lisa Ford, 2021-08-10 During the Age of Revolution, the British Crown responded to crises in its colonies with a heavy hand. Lisa Ford shows how imperial peacekeeping methods, which blurred the line between the rule of law and the rule of the sword, transformed the imperial constitution and corroded colonial subjectivity. |
thistlewood diary: Sex and Sexuality in Early America Merril D. Smith, 1998-09 What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic? Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories. Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler. |
thistlewood diary: Stedman's Surinam John Gabriel Stedman, 1992-03 This abridgment of the Prices' acclaimed 1988 critical edition is based on Stedman's original, handwritten manuscript, which offers a portrait at considerable variance with the 1796 classic. The unexpurgated text, presented here with extensive notes and commentary, constitutes one of the richest and most evocative accounts ever written of colonial life—and one of the strongest indictments ever to appear against New World slavery. |
thistlewood diary: Slavery and the Slave Trade James Walvin (historicus), 1983 |
thistlewood diary: The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman John Gabriel Stedman, 2024-03-25 Jared Ross Hardesty's new critical edition, The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman, makes an important and necessary intervention into the study of eighteenth-century Caribbean travel writing and natural history by foregrounding the previously unpublished diary entries Stedman authored in Suriname, rather than focusing solely on his writings printed in the metropoles of Europe. Hardesty's edition is especially useful because it includes both a transcription of Stedman's Suriname diary and a detailed appendix tracking key discrepancies between the diary and Stedman's heavily revised printed natural history. This focus on genre and the editorial process in the production of Anglophone transatlantic writing is an excellent resource for students and scholars of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and the Atlantic World. I can see this being a helpful resource in an early American or eighteenth-century history or literature course, as it would enable students to easily compare differing editions of Stedman's Suriname writings. What Hardesty's edition of The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman offers is a more accessible study of how eighteenth-century writing on maroonage, slavery, science, and abolition was heavily mediated in the print and production process, as this compiled edition offers critical insight into the gendered and racial politics of life in the colonial Caribbean as well as how printers in the metropole attempted to alter the writing of colonizing authors like Stedman. —Elizabeth Polcha, Drexel University |
thistlewood diary: The World That Fear Made Jason T. Sharples, 2020-07-17 A thought-provoking history of slaveholders' fear of the people they enslaved and its consequences From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection. Because enslavers in British North America and the Caribbean methodically terrorized slaves and anticipated just vengeance, colonial officials consolidated their regime around the dread of rebellion. As Sharples shows through a comprehensive data set, colonial officials launched investigations into dubious rumors of planned revolts twice as often as actual slave uprisings occurred. In most of these cases, magistrates believed they had discovered plans for insurrection, coordinated by a network of enslaved men, just in time to avert the uprising. Their crackdowns, known as conspiracy scares, could last for weeks and involve hundreds of suspects. They sometimes brought the execution or banishment of dozens of slaves at a time, and loss and heartbreak many times over. Mining archival records, Sharples shows how colonists from New York to Barbados tortured slaves to solicit confessions of baroque plots that were strikingly consistent across places and periods. Informants claimed that conspirators took direction from foreign agents; timed alleged rebellions for a holiday such as Easter; planned to set fires that would make it easier to ambush white people in the confusion; and coordinated the uprising with European or Native American invasion forces. Yet, as Sharples demonstrates, these scripted accounts rarely resembled what enslaved rebels actually did when they took up arms. Ultimately, he argues, conspiracy scares locked colonists and slaves into a cycle of terror that bound American society together through shared racial fear. |
thistlewood diary: The Wages of Slavery Michael Twaddle, 2013-06-17 The transition from chattel slavery to forced labour in Africa and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has commanded increasing attention from scholars in recent years. The Wages of Slavery tackles this subject from a protoproletarian perspective, studies new labour regimes in Africa and the Caribbean, and discusses work practices before and after emancipation the nature of the working week, subsistence and surplus for slaves and free person, and labour negotiations and confrontations. |
thistlewood diary: Black Ivory James Walvin, 1994 The brutal story of African slavery in the British colonies of the West Indies and North America is told with clarity and compassion in this classic history. James Walvin explores the experiences which bound together slaves from diverse African backgrounds and explains how slavery transformed the tastes and economy of the Western world. Although written for readers with no prior knowledge of the subject, Walvins's account is based on detailed scholarship, drawing on a body of work from the USA, the West Indies and Britain. All aspects of African slavery up to 1776 are covered; the situation of women, flight and rebellion, disease and death, the conditions on the slave ships, the abolition campaign and much more. The narrative is enlivened and personalised by frequent reference to individual lives. For this revised edition, the author has incorporated recent scholarly findings and updated the notes and bibliography in order to keep the book current. |
thistlewood diary: The Unending Frontier John F. Richards, 2003-05-15 John F. |
thistlewood diary: Ghosts of Slavery Jenny Sharpe, 2003 |
thistlewood diary: Race and Family in the Colonial South , |
thistlewood diary: The Caribbean Gad Heuman, 2018-11-01 In this new edition of his crucial introduction to Caribbean history, Gad Heuman provides a comprehensive overview of the region's history, from its earliest inhabitants to contemporary political and cultural developments. Topics covered include: - The Amerindians - Sugary and Slavery - Race, Racism and Equality - The Aftermath of Emancipation - The Revolutionary Caribbean - Cultures of the Caribbean - Contemporary Themes This third edition has been updated to reflect the latest developments in the literature, and takes into account important recent events including the rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba, the ongoing problem of climate change and the threat of the Zika virus. The companion website, which includes chapter questions, a primary documents bibliography, a timeline and link to relevant websites, has also been updated with new material. The book considers not only the political and social struggles that have shaped the Caribbean, but also provides a sense of the development of the region's culture. The Caribbean: A Brief History is ideal for all students seeking a clear and readable introduction to Caribbean history. Companion Website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/the-caribbean/ |
thistlewood diary: Auto/Biography in the Americas Ricia Chansky, 2018-02-02 Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives brings together scholars from disparate geographic regions, cultural perspectives, linguistic frameworks, and disciplinary backgrounds to explore what connects narrated lives in the Americas. By interweaving scholarship on Afro-diasporic subjectivities, gendered narratives, lives in translation, celebrity auto/biographies, and pedagogical approaches to teaching auto/biographical narratives, this volume argues that connections between the contrasting locations of the Americas may be found in a shared history of diasporic movement that causes a heightened awareness of the need to belong and to thereby define the self in relation to others. Read together, the essays in this collection suggest that identities across the Americas are constructed with an emphasis on intersubjectivity and relationality. This transnational approach to reading life writing beyond the borders of the Americas—pertinent to comparative American studies and hemispheric studies as well as life writing and auto/biography studies—also demonstrates an interdisciplinary, international, and multilingual model for collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences. The scholars included in this volume work in the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and education, and furthermore, this book marks the first time that many of these scholars have had their work translated into and published in English. This book was originally published as a special issue of a|b: Auto|Biography Studies. |
thistlewood diary: Afro-Creole Richard D. E. Burton, 2018-10-18 This wide-ranging book explores the origins, development, and character of Afro-Caribbean cultures from the slave period to the present day. Richard D. E. Burton focuses on ways in which African traditions—including those in religion, music, food, dress, and family structure—were transformed by interaction with European and indigenous forces to create the particular cultures of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. He demonstrates how the resulting Afro-Creole cultures have both challenged and reinforced the social, political, and economic status quo in these countries.Jamaican slaves opposed slavery in many ways and one of the most important, Burton suggests, was the development of Afro-Christianity. He pays particular attention to the African-derived Christmas celebration of Jonkonnu as an expression of opposition and then documents religion in the post-slavery period, with an emphasis on Rastafarianism in Jamaica and Vodou in Haiti. The element of play has always figured importantly in Afro-Caribbean life. Burton examines the evolution of carnival and calypso in Trinidad and describes the significance of cricket in defining Caribbean national identity. Based on ten years of research, Afro-Creole draws on historical, anthropological, sociological, and literary sources. Burton characterizes the emergence of Caribbean identity with three different national flavors and demonstrates how culture both reflects and impacts people's changing sense of their own political power. |
thistlewood diary: Zong! M. NourbeSe Philip, 2008-09-23 A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry |
thistlewood diary: Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 Elaine Savory, Erica L. Johnson, 2020-11-03 This book revisits Jean Rhys’s ground-breaking 1966 novel to explore its cultural and artistic influence in the areas of not only literature and literary criticism, but fashion design, visual art, and the theatre as well. Building on symposia that were held in London and New York in 2016 in honour of the novel’s half-century, this collection demonstrates just how timely Rhys’s insights into colonial history, sexual relations, and aesthetics continue to be. The chapters include an extensive interview with novelist Caryl Phillips, who in 2018 published a novel about Rhys’s life, an account of how Wide Sargasso Sea can be read through the lens of the #MeToo Movement, a clothing line inspired by the novel, and new critical directions. As both a celebration and scholarly evaluation, the collection shows how enduring Rhys’s novel is in its continuing literary influence and social commentary. |
thistlewood diary: Early Modern Medicine Olivia Weisser, 2024-03-21 This collection offers readers a guide to analyzing historical texts and objects using a diverse selection of sources in early modern medicine. It provides an array of interpretive strategies while also highlighting new trends in the field. Each chapter serves as a study of a different type of source, including the benefits and limitations of that source and what it can reveal about the history of medicine. Contributors provide practical strategies for locating and interpreting sources, putting texts and objects into conversation, and explaining potential contradictions. A wide variety of sources, including account books, legal records, and personal letters, provide new opportunities for understanding early modern medicine and developing skills in historical analysis. Together, the chapters highlight emerging methodologies and debates, while covering a range of themes in the field, from reproductive health to hospital care to household medicine. With wide geographical breadth, this book is a valuable resource for students and researchers looking to understand how to better engage with primary sources, as well as readers interested in early modern history and the history of medicine. |
thistlewood diary: The African Diaspora Patrick Manning, 2010-03-05 Patrick Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In joining these stories, he shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community. He tracks discourses on race, changes in economic circumstance, the evolving character of family life, and the growth of popular culture. He underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history and demonstrates the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity. Inclusive and far-reaching, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be fully understood without taking the African peoples and the African continent into account. |
thistlewood diary: Slave Wales Chris Evans, 2010-09-30 Atlantic slavery does not loom large in the traditional telling of Welsh history. Yet Wales, like many regions of Europe, was deeply affected by the forced migration of captive Africans. Welsh commodities, like copper and brass made in Swansea, were used to purchase slaves on the African coast and some Welsh products, such as woollens from Montgomeryshire, were an important feature of plantation life in the West Indies. In turn, the profits of plantation agriculture flowed back into Wales, to be invested in new industries or to be lavished on country mansions. This book looks at Slave Wales between 1650 and 1850, bringing the most up-to-date scholarship on Atlantic slavery to bear on the Welsh experience. New research by Chris Evans casts light on previously unknown episodes, such as Welsh involvement with slave-based copper mining in nineteenth-century Cuba, and illuminates in new and disturbing ways familiar features of Welsh history - like the woollen industry - that have previously unsuspected 'slave dimensions'. Many Welsh people turned against slavery in the late eighteenth century, but Welsh abolitionism was never a particularly powerful force. Indeed, Chris Evans demonstrates that Welsh participation the slave Atlantic lasted well beyond the abolition of Britain's slave trade in 1807 and the ending of slavery in Britain's Caribbean empire in 1834. |
thistlewood diary: Over the Threshold Christine Daniels, Michael V. Kennedy, 2014-04-08 Over the Threshold is the first in-depth work to explore the topic of intimate violence in the American colonies and the early Republic. The essays examine domestic violence in both urban and frontier environments, between husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves. This compelling collection puts commonly held notions about intimate violence under strict historical scrutiny, often producing surprising results. |
thistlewood diary: A Tale of Two Plantations Richard S. Dunn, 2014-11-04 Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families. |
thistlewood diary: Tacky’s Revolt Vincent Brown, 2020-01-14 Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Elsa Goveia Book Prize Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations Winner of the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize Winner of the Harriet Tubman Prize Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award Finalist for the Cundill Prize “Brilliant...groundbreaking...Brown’s profound analysis and revolutionary vision of the Age of Slave War—from the too-often overlooked Tacky’s Revolt to the better-known Haitian Revolution—gives us an original view of the birth of modern freedom in the New World.” —Cornel West “Not only a story of the insurrection, but ‘a martial geography of Atlantic slavery,’ vividly demonstrating how warfare shaped every aspect of bondage...Forty years after Tacky’s defeat, new arrivals from Africa were still hearing about the daring rebels who upended the island.” —Harper’s “A sobering read for contemporary audiences in countries engaged in forever wars...It is also a useful reminder that the distinction between victory and defeat, when it comes to insurgencies, is often fleeting: Tacky may have lost his battle, but the enslaved did eventually win the war.” —New Yorker In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended their domain, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before. Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event, Tacky’s Revolt expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today. |
thistlewood diary: Africa in America Michael Mullin, 1992 In an attempt to lay bare the historical and cultural roots of modern African American societies in the South and the British West Indies, Michael Mullin gives a vivid depiction of slave family life, economic strategies, and religion and their relationship to patterns of resistance and acculturation in two major plantation regions, the Caribbean and the American South. Generalized observations of plantation slavery, usually assumed to be the whole of Africans' experience, fail to provide definitive answers about how they met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives. Mullin discusses three phases of slave resistance and religion in Anglo-America, both on and off plantations. During the first, or African, phase from the 1730s to the 1760s slave resistance was generally sudden, violently destructive, and charged with African ritual. The second phase, from the late 1760s to the early 1800s, involved plantation slaves who were more conservative and wary. The third phase, from the late 1760s to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, was led by assimilated blacks - artisans and drivers - who, having developed skills both on and off the plantation, led the large preemancipation rebellions. Mullin's case studies of slaveowners and plantation overseers draw on personal diaries and other documents to reveal memorable men whose approaches to their jobs varied widely and were as much affected by interactions with slaves as by personal background, the location of the plantation, and the economic climate of the times. Extensive archival and anecdotal sources inform this pioneering study of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Bringing his training in anthropology to bear on sources from Great Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, Mullin offers new and definitive information. |
thistlewood diary: The Sugar Barons Matthew Parker, 2012-11-13 Traces the rise and fall of Caribbean sugar dynasties, discussing the Britain's dependence on colony wealth, the role of slavery in sugar plantation culture, and the North American colonial opposition to sugar policy in London. |
thistlewood diary: Beyond Bondage David Barry Gaspar, Darlene Clark Hine, 2010-10-01 Emancipation, manumission, and complex legalities surrounding slavery led to a number of women of color achieving a measure of freedom and prosperity from the 1600s through the 1800s. These black women held property in places like Suriname and New Orleans, headed households in Brazil, enjoyed religious freedom in Peru, and created new selves and new lives across the Caribbean. Beyond Bondage outlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, carved out many kinds of existences. Although their freedom--represented by respectability, opportunity, and the acquisition of property--always remained precarious, the essayists support the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts. |
thistlewood diary: New Studies in the History of American Slavery Edward E. Baptist, Stephanie M. H. Camp, 2006 These essays, by some of the most prominent young historians writing about slavery, fill gaps in our understanding of such subjects as enslaved women, the Atlantic and internal slave trades, the relationships between Indians and enslaved people, and enslavement in Latin America. Inventive and stimulating, the essays model the blending of methods and styles that characterizes the new cultural history of slavery’s social, political, and economic systems. Several common themes emerge from the volume, among them the correlation between race and identity; the meanings contained in family and community relationships, gender, and life’s commonplaces; and the literary and legal representations that legitimated and codified enslavement and difference. Such themes signal methodological and pedagogical shifts in the field away from master/slave or white/black race relations models toward perspectives that give us deeper access to the mental universe of slavery. Topics of the essays range widely, including European ideas about the reproductive capacities of African women and the process of making race in the Atlantic world, the contradictions of the assimilation of enslaved African American runaways into Creek communities, the consequences and meanings of death to Jamaican slaves and slave owners, and the tensions between midwifery as a black cultural and spiritual institution and slave midwives as health workers in a plantation economy. Opening our eyes to the personal, the contentious, and even the intimate, these essays call for a history in which both enslaved and enslavers acted in a vast human drama of bondage and freedom, salvation and damnation, wealth and exploitation. |
thistlewood diary: One Grand Noise Jerrilyn McGregory, 2021-07-29 Winner of the 2022 Chicago Folklore Prize For many, December 26 is more than the day after Christmas. Boxing Day is one of the world’s most celebrated cultural holidays. As a legacy of British colonialism, Boxing Day is observed throughout Africa and parts of the African diaspora, but, unlike Trinidadian Carnival and Mardi Gras, fewer know of Bermuda’s Gombey dancers, Bahamian Junkanoo, Dangriga’s Jankunú and Charikanari, St. Croix’s Crucian Christmas Festival, and St. Kitts’s Sugar Mas. One Grand Noise: Boxing Day in the Anglicized Caribbean World delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the use of spectacular vernacular to metaphorically dramatize such tropes as “one grand noise,” “foreday morning,” and from “back o’ town.” In cultural solidarity and an obvious critique of Western values and norms, revelers engage in celebratory sounds, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and dancing with abandon along thoroughfares usually deemed anathema to them. Folklorist Jerrilyn McGregory demonstrates how the cultural producers in various island locations ritualize Boxing Day as a part of their struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in accordance with time and space. Based on ethnographic study undertaken by McGregory, One Grand Noise explores Boxing Day as part of a creolization process from slavery into the twenty-first century. McGregory traces the holiday from its Egyptian origins to today and includes chapters on the Gombey dancers of Bermuda, the evolution of Junkanoo/Jankunú in The Bahamas and Belize, and J'ouvert traditions in St. Croix and St. Kitts. Through her exploration of the holiday, McGregory negotiates the ways in which Boxing Day has expanded from small communal traditions into a common history of colonialism that keeps alive a collective spirit of resistance. |
thistlewood diary: Named Camilla Balshaw, 2025-06-05 'Gutsy, entertaining and thought-provoking...A marvellous book.' Diana Evans What's in a name? Everything we carry, and everything we are. Our names are a shadow we carry around with us. They are part of who we are. Our names are a marker of our self-identity and our sense of self. Our names have the power to shock. They have the power to heal, and they have the power to trigger conversations around race, class, social mobility and belonging. But what is a name? What do our names tell us about ourselves? And why do they matter? Named is a fascinating exploration of names, global naming conventions and identity politics woven into a moving, personal narrative about the finding of family and self. At the intersection of memoir and social and cultural history it is a truly fascinating book about the seemingly ordinary and every day. The author's own narrative about her estrangement from her Nigerian father, the grapples with her Jamaican mother and her journey towards identity is woven through the chapters making it an engaging and intimate investigation of what makes us who we are. |
thistlewood diary: The Driver’s Story Randy M. Browne, 2024-05-07 The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver’s Story, Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men—and sometimes women—at the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one’s fellow enslaved laborers? In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people’s working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers, aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised, negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community, drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging, as husbands and fathers, as Big Men, and as leaders of diasporic African “nations.” Sometimes, drivers even organized rebellions, sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support. Compelling and original, The Driver’s Story enriches our understanding of the never-ending war between enslavers and enslaved laborers by focusing on its front line. It also brings us face-to-face with the horror of capitalist labor exploitation. |
thistlewood diary: Creole Testimonies N. Aljoe, 2012-01-02 Analyses the relationships among the socio-historical contexts, generic forms, and rhetorical strategies of British West Indian slave narratives. Grounded by the syncretic theories of creolisation and testimonio it breaks new ground by reading these dictated and fragmentary narratives on their own terms as examples of 'creole testimony'. |
thistlewood diary: Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History Kristina R. Gaddy, 2022-10-04 One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year Named one of the Most Memorable Music Books of the Year by No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music “Compelling.… [R]eveals [an instrument] intimately rooted in the African diaspora and capable of expressing flights of sorrow and joy.” —David Yezzi, Wall Street Journal An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music. In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo’s beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became U.S. states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York. African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten. |
Thistlewood Farm - Remodeling a Vintage Farmhouse with …
I'm KariAnne Wood, welcome to Thistlewood Farm! Come journey with me remodeling my vintage farmhouse in the middle of the country. Enjoy the design tips!
Blog - Thistlewood Farm
Latest Blog Posts TIPS 12 Products I Wish I Would Have Bought Sooner STORIES When the Rest of the Yard Sale Story is Even Better
Thistlewood Farms Home Tour | Thistlewood Farms
Welcome to the Thistlewood Farms home hour! Here, we take you through each room of our home, my favorite elements of each room, and more! Join us!
About - Thistlewood Farm
Thistlewood Farm is so much more than just DIY’s and home decor. It’s about family and tortoises and recipe plate racks and shutter walls and twirly whirly skirts and pancakes and Lee Press …
Where Can You Purchase Thistlewood Products?
You can see more of the products here. Thistlewood Products are available online and in stores across the country. If you don’t have a store near you, you can shop the products online here. …
Thistlekeeping - Thistlewood Farm
May 3, 2025 · Random thoughts on a weekend full of sunshine: 1. I’m so excited about Mother’s Day. I’m treating my mother and mother-in-law and then the kids have planned a full day […]
Thistlekeeping - Thistlewood Farm
Apr 5, 2025 · Random thoughts on a rainy Saturday: 1. I am so happy right now because the Dipladenias are blooming and blooming. I wait all year for the Dipladenias to arrive. We […]
Bottle Brush Christmas Tree Upcycle DIY - Thistlewood Farm
Nov 18, 2024 · Looking for an easy DIY for Christmas? Here's a simple DIY for an upcycled bottle brush tree. All you need is five minutes and little how-to.
Classic Christmas Home Tour For the Holidays - Thistlewood Farm
Nov 19, 2024 · Today I want to share a Christmas tour of my historic home. Here's a classic Christmas home tour with vintage finds and tons of color.
Before and After House Tour - Thistlewood Farm
Oct 19, 2023 · Looking for ideas to transform rooms in your home? Here is our home's journey with a little before and after house tour.
Thistlewood Farm - Remodeling a Vintage Farmhouse with …
I'm KariAnne Wood, welcome to Thistlewood Farm! Come journey with me remodeling my vintage farmhouse in the middle of the country. Enjoy the design tips!
Blog - Thistlewood Farm
Latest Blog Posts TIPS 12 Products I Wish I Would Have Bought Sooner STORIES When the Rest of the Yard Sale Story is Even Better
Thistlewood Farms Home Tour | Thistlewood Farms
Welcome to the Thistlewood Farms home hour! Here, we take you through each room of our home, my favorite elements of each room, and more! Join us!
About - Thistlewood Farm
Thistlewood Farm is so much more than just DIY’s and home decor. It’s about family and tortoises and recipe plate racks and shutter walls and twirly whirly skirts and pancakes and Lee Press …
Where Can You Purchase Thistlewood Products?
You can see more of the products here. Thistlewood Products are available online and in stores across the country. If you don’t have a store near you, you can shop the products online here. …
Thistlekeeping - Thistlewood Farm
May 3, 2025 · Random thoughts on a weekend full of sunshine: 1. I’m so excited about Mother’s Day. I’m treating my mother and mother-in-law and then the kids have planned a full day […]
Thistlekeeping - Thistlewood Farm
Apr 5, 2025 · Random thoughts on a rainy Saturday: 1. I am so happy right now because the Dipladenias are blooming and blooming. I wait all year for the Dipladenias to arrive. We […]
Bottle Brush Christmas Tree Upcycle DIY - Thistlewood Farm
Nov 18, 2024 · Looking for an easy DIY for Christmas? Here's a simple DIY for an upcycled bottle brush tree. All you need is five minutes and little how-to.
Classic Christmas Home Tour For the Holidays - Thistlewood Farm
Nov 19, 2024 · Today I want to share a Christmas tour of my historic home. Here's a classic Christmas home tour with vintage finds and tons of color.
Before and After House Tour - Thistlewood Farm
Oct 19, 2023 · Looking for ideas to transform rooms in your home? Here is our home's journey with a little before and after house tour.