This paper was presented by Dr. McDavid at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Historical Archaeology, January, 2006, Sacramento, California.

Introduction

Today, I will approach the idea of the political economy of freedom by looking at how a particular "freedom narrative" was enacted when previously enslaved people created Freedmantown, in Houston, Texas, and how this narrative continued as the founders' descendants (lineal and cultural) occupied,, renamed and reclaimed the physical space in which the contemporary Freedmen's Town still exists. I will also examine how these processes occurred despite and because of racist public policies and gentrification pressures which have, over the past 67 years, systematically attempted to erase Freedmen's Town from the map of Houston. Finally, I hope to begin to account for the contested, overlapping, multivalent ways that multiple stakeholders, including our archaeology project and its sponsors, have participated in and intersected with this "freedom narrative."

Freedmen's Town is an economically disadvantaged but historically rich urban African American neighborhood where, for the past several years, my co-director David Bruner and I have directed a volunteer-based historical archaeology project. We do this under the sponsorship of the Yates Museum, a house museum and preservation organization. We conduct field schools for two local universities, do mitigation and research archaeology on various Freedmen's Town sites, and implement a variety of public archaeology activities. We hope to create a collaborative, contextual, reciprocal, mutually empowered project which is community based, not just community placed (Ervin 2000). At this point the jury is still out as to whether that will be possible.

Historical Overview

First, some historical context. After the Civil War, and in some cases before the war ended, Freedmen's Towns -- known by different variants, including Freedmantown, Freedman's Town, and Free Man's Town -- began to appear across the South. Some of these were built as havens for escaped enslaved people, such as the one in Mitchelville, South Carolina. More often they were founded by people immigrating from rural to urban areas after the Civil War. Although I have found examples of several, from Texas to Mississippi to Kansas to South Carolina (perhaps most notably the one in Dallas now being investigated by Maria Franklin, Jim Davidson, Jamie Brandon, and others) to my knowledge Houston's Freedman's Town is only remaining freedman's community in the United States which is still occupied by descendants of the original founders. Although endangered, in every sense of the word, what local residents define as Freedman's Town is still an extant community with a strong sense of its own history. It was founded by previously enslaved people immediately after the Civil War [House, ND #1959; Maxwell, 1997 #1996; Wintz, 1990 #1761; Wintz, 2002 #1258]. Some of these founders already lived in Houston, but most flowed in from surrounding plantations, entering the city by way of the old San Felipe Road, and settling in the swampy Buffalo Bayou bottom land just west of central Houston. One historian, Louise Passey Maxwell, has made the case that one of the main reasons they chose this particular area to settle was because they were able, for a variety of reasons, to buy property there, and thus to create a black community, free from white surveillance. In any case, by the 1870's, black property owners comprised the majority of residents of Freedmantown (Maxwell 1997: 149).

Freedmantown was located within a larger political and geographical unit called Fourth Ward, which had been established in 1839 and included other black and mixed neighborhoods to the south and east of San Felipe Road, the road which abutted Freedmantown. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Fourth Ward, including Freedmantown, was the center of black cultural, educational, and professional life in Houston, notable for the number of important black institutions it housed (Wintz 1990). It is where Houston's first black lawyers, printers, judges, doctors, ministers and teachers owned homes, lived, and worked, and it became known as the "mother ward" of black Houston (Wintz 2002). The desire for self-determination which drove the creation of the original community -- the freedom to live where one likes, and with whom one wants to live -- still exists today.

In 1938 most of the houses in the original Freedmantown settlement disappeared entirely, when, through eminent domain, the city took the land to build a thousand-unit housing project for low income white people called "San Felipe Courts." Despite protests to city hall and the federal government that this project would dislocate hundreds of people from one of the city's most important black neighborhoods, the government went ahead with the project (Beeth and Wintz 1992). But this was not the end of Freedmantown.

According to oral history, what was originally mapped as "Freedmantown" (and there is one map with that name), by then, simply expanded to include the area just south and east of the original settlement (House 2005) -- that is, part of the larger Fourth Ward. Although we have not yet been able to track individual people through census and land records, it does seem likely that many of those who were displaced from their original homes in 1938 would simply have moved to the other side of San Felipe, because it was where so many important churches, schools, and businesses had already been built. In any case, over time the original name fell into disuse (Maxwell 1997), and people began referring to the neighborhood as simply "Fourth Ward."

Over the middle part of the 20th century, Fourth Ward became vulnerable to expansion pressures from the central business district (Beeth and Wintz 1992); large parts of it are now under downtown skyscrapers. The part of the Ward that is now known as Freedmen's Town is the area just south of the original settlement, and is now a designated National Historic District. I'd like to tell that story by jumping forward a few years, to examine contemporary hopes for the area, and to consider how our archaeology project might intersect with those hopes.

From Freedmantown to the Freedmen's Town Historic District

When Gladys House, a fifth generation descendant of the community's founders, was 14 years old, in the 1960's, she started to attend meetings having to do with the future of her community. These meetings represented the City of Houston's early efforts to begin "urban renewal" in the inner city. As she put it,

"I would attend the community meetings [and hear] the bad attitude of the elected officials [about my neighborhood] . . . so I began to talk to some of the elders . . . and . . . to do . . . oral interviews . . . . There was nothing in the library, the whole library, on Freedmen's Town, so I began to do more research . . . [to] try and start putting something on paper about the history of Freedmen's Town."

At about the same time that House was starting to work on the Register designation, in 1980 a man named Lenwood Johnson moved to the public housing project at San Felipe Courts -- by then they were allowing African Americans to live there. He, too, became interested in the history of the land upon which his home sat. He too decided to organize his community to obtain a National Register listing, this time for San Felipe Courts, which was known by then as Allen Parkway Village. He enlisted the aid of several community professionals, and, despite the resistance of the Housing Authority which owned the project, that designation too was awarded, in 1987. Johnson formed a group called "The Unity," which is now known as the "Free Man's Neighborhood Association." He told me that rather than working under the auspices of the Freedmen's Town Association, his group wanted to unite the people who lived in what was now "Freedmen's Town" and the citizens of Allen Parkway Village, which was located over the original settlement. Johnson and his group wanted not only to preserve the physical structures in the project -- which were in themselves an important example of early modernist architecture -- but also to implement an ambitious, resident-led management plan. They got a lot of support, even for a time from the Director of HUD, but over time -- this is a very long story, and I cannot do it justice here -- the City and Housing Authority prevailed and in the mid-1990's, most of the project was bulldozed and a new mix of low income and affordable housing was built. The important thing for today's purposes is to point out that acquiring the National Register designation for San Felipe Courts was seen by Johnson and others as a way to, in effect, reclaim the original Freedmantown and to reconnect it to the adjacent area that Gladys House had gotten designated as "Freedmen's Town."

So, in the late 1980's and early 90's, hopes were high within the community that these designations would generate funds to drive a full scale preservation effort. However, the City refused to work with either Johnson or House (in fact exploiting their many differences whenever possible) and refused to lend any support to the grant applications which the designations would have enhanced. A number of internal reports and planning maps created by the Housing Authority and the City during this period have emerged, through the work of various reporters and activists, and it is clear that complete erasure was always the stated intent of the developer-friendly city government and the various agencies which colluded with it.

During the same period, pastors of the local churches were claiming their own stakes in the future of Freedmen's Town. Some wanted to preserve the historical character of the community, and allied themselves with House or Johnson. Some wanted to promote their own property development schemes, and destroyed plenty of historic houses in the process. Recently some of the more historically minded have formed the "Pastoral Leadership Coalition," in an effort to preserve several historic churches. Other stakeholders have also emerged, including the residents of the new housing in the community. I recently learned that some of these newcomers were told, by the outsider groups selling them their homes, that that they should avoid associating with the existing (black) community groups, and instead should form their own neighborhood associations. Another stakeholder is the Yates Museum, our sponsor, which is buying property in order to preserve it. Developers and city planners who want to "redevelop" Freedmen's Town into a yuppie village are stakeholders too, and most deny the racism and classism which underpins their efforts -- as one developer said to a newspaper recently, "why shouldn't a black dentist want a nice, new neighborhood too"? And I can't forget that we, the archaeologists, are stakeholders too. We are building our careers on the backs of the community, and this talk is one example of that.

In short, it is within this unstable, contested, strife-filled and sometimes downright nasty political and social terrain that we are trying to do "community archaeology". Over the past year or so, we are a little closer to the goals I stated earlier, and I think that this is for two reasons. First, we now have a better understanding of the community -- of, as Leone Potter and Shackel put it years ago, its "interests and conflicts," and the historical and contemporary dynamics I've just described. The second reason is going to seem almost heretical, I suspect. We've started to understand that our work having meaning to the community has little to do with how we include them in the work itself -- that is, how we formulate research questions, analyze results, and so on. Sure, it's great when it happens, and we will keep trying, but the reality is that people have their own lives to lead. Mutually empowered collaborative research takes a huge amount of time -- for everyone. While we -- the archaeologists -- may be willing to devote these chunks of time, this is because we see this as our "job" (Stoecker 1997). The stakeholders we work with may not have that luxury, or, even, desire.

So, how does this relate back to the topic today? How can the idea of freedom, as expressed in terms of self reliance, self-determination, and independence, intersect with how we do archaeology in Freedmen's town? We can turn to the community's own words for some clues -- here are some excerpts from several interviews with House, Johnson, and other community members:

"[In the past] . . . [the community was] . . . prominent, progressive. And we didn’t have to go to the Caucasians for anything; we were self-sustaining . . . . "We could get anything we needed . . . we didn't have to rely on anyone outside, we had our own doctors, lawyers, schools, and stores . . . . People were genuine and did all they could do to help . . . they wanted to get to the finish line together. You talk about a village raising? Well, everybody . . . helped you to raise your children . . . the whole community worked together . . . It was like a big village, and we all supported one another . . . we had a nurturing neighborhood . . . . We just took what we had and shared it . . . it brings joy and happiness, when you can do that. That’s what we had in this neighborhood . . . .

When they speak of what they want for their community in the future, the same ideas emerge, in a different form. As House put it:

I [want to] bring back all of the former grassroots residents of Freedmen's Town . . . and all of them would be welcomed back in the community . . . . We would open our businesses up out here again, so that we could be an independent community . . . and our people would be in power . . . this would be a community of being in charge of itself . . . .

These expressions of freedom and independence in Freedmen's Town are the cultural and spiritual descendants of the original spirit which created the original community of Freedmantown. So, not long ago I asked both House and Johnson how they saw our work -- what they saw it doing for them -- in order to better understand how their freedom narrative could intersect with our archaeology project. It surprised me to learn that they didn't really expect our work to aid directly in achieving the goals that they expressed above. Nor did they want to participate in our research. Both expressed enthusiastic support for archaeology, but their enthusiasm was for three things.

First, they want the new information that archaeology can offer about the past -- especially when this information can counter negative ethnic and class stereotypes in the larger Houston community.

Second and equally important, they like the legitimization that our work, done by people with fancy PhD's and so on, confers on their own efforts to convince others that their community is worth saving. That is, they use our work strategically, when they see the need. For example, House told me how she had put a report we had given her, about one of her properties we had investigated, on the desk of a city planner, to show that "an authority" thought that her neighborhood was important enough to study, and save. The specific content of our report was less important than the fact that we had done the work and written up the report.

Third, they are enthusiastic (if a bit surprised) about our ongoing efforts to talk to white people about African American archaeology, as well my own recent activism when speaking to white audiences about white privilege. While they are happy when we want to involve community people, especially kids, in our project, they are just as happy for us to bring students and volunteers in from the outside, most of whom are white. They know that this will create support for their own agendas, as well as more respect for their neighborhood. It does, too -- I recently accidentally encountered a blog where a previous student said his experience doing archaeology in Freedmen's Town had been "life changing." House, Johnson, and others see clearly that our work can be used for their purposes, both directly and indirectly.

But in terms of being full "research partners," we have found that most of the time, community members are far too busy with their own fights to help us do what they see as our jobs. But they do want us to do those jobs. They do want us to share what we learn, as long as we do so with respect for existing community narratives, oral history accounts, as well as their own policy and programming goals. The latter has been challenging at times, because our sponsor is a preservation-first organization, and within the community, other needs sometimes trump preservation, and negotiating a pathway between the two has occasionally been difficult. But for the most part community people are happy for us to do, as one put it, "our own thing," in terms of how we organize and conduct archaeological research. They are also pleased to provide interpretation assistance when asked, as well as feedback to insure that we are presenting our findings sensitively. In short, with their help, we are learning to walk a thin line -- to offer our skills, resources and information to them to use for their own agendas, while at the same time pursuing the research questions we are interested in. We are learning that, given transparency and openness, these are not mutually exclusive activities.

Political economy and gentrification

Today I've spoken mostly about local contexts, but larger ones are important to consider briefly as I close. Gentrification and historic preservation efforts in Freedmen's Town, Houston are part of the larger political economy of 21st century Texas. They are connected to national, even global issues surrounding urban policy, historic consciousness, racism, classism, systematic erasure and displacement. In Houston, as is true elsewhere, the proximity of the neighborhood to the downtown area lends urgency to the problem. I am not all sure that one small archaeology project can have a substantive role to play in resisting these larger forces.

But we can take the time and energy to truly understand how the communities we work with construct their own narratives, and how they find meaning in their own histories -- that is, we can be what most of us in this room were trained to be in the first place, anthropologists. How many times have any of us done intensive, systematic ethnographic research since we started to specialize in archaeology? We can use our work to enhance community agendas (in the case described here, to support self-determination and independence) but only if we know what those agendas are, what they sprang from, and what they hope to accomplish. This type of contemporary context research should not be something nice that we only do if we happen to have the time and budget for it -- it should be mainstreamed into our projects and seen as a normative and necessary part of archaeological research. The topic raised by today's session planners has allowed me to see the Freedmen's Town community, and its agendas, through a different sort of lens, and my awareness of, and sensitivity to, the community is enhanced because of it.

In April of 1849 an enslaved man named Billy was charged with poisoning his owner Thomas Wilcox, and ten years later a house servant was charged with poisoning Wilcox's son.[1] Although rare, this was one of the many modes of resistance practiced by enslaved African Americans. Thomas Wilcox owned North Bend Plantation, and was one of Charles City County's most elite men.

After the Transatlantic Slave Trade ended in 1808, and the Virginia tobacco industry declined, Virginia became known as the "Negro raising state," as planters began to "breed slaves" for the internal market. The booming cotton and Sugar industries of the 1830s in the southern United States, and Caribbean called for a rapid influx of enslaved labor. Virginia began to export thousands of enslaved African Americans, contributing to what is known as the "second middle passage." North Bend Plantation is located in Charles City County Virginia, roughly 20 miles east of Richmond. It was established in 1819, and by 1830 at least 80 enslaved African Americans lived on the property.[2] During the 1830s close to 17 percent of Charles City County's enslaved population was sold south by way of the Richmond internal slave market, and within a decade the population returned to its 1830 level.[3]

This historic moment invites many unanswered questions. Through my intended dissertation research I hope to answer the following: How did the enslaved community react to this rapid export of their fellow community and family members? Was there resistance or any form of agency within the enslaved community? How did gender play into this equation? What role did Nat Turner's rebellion play in who was exported and who stayed? Lastly, how does the rapid disruption of enslaved households show up in the archeological record? An interdisciplinary study of North Bend Plantations' enslaved community will shed light on these inquires, and provide a better understanding of enslaved life during the mid 19th century.

North Bend Plantation is located on the historic Weyanoke tract in Charles City County. All of the landowners at North Bend were prominent figures in the Charles City County social circles. The families at North Bend plantation socialized with the elite communities of Sherwood Forrest, Shirley, Belle Aire, Evelynton, and Berkeley Plantations.[4] The Minge family owned this land as early as 1785. Dr. John Minge established North Bend Plantation in 1819, and finished the erection of the main house by 1820. Minge continued to live at North Bend until 1832 when he subdivided the total acreage between his two sons, James and John. John received the house and the surrounding 500 acres, which would be called Kittewan Creek from 1832-1850. Later in 1850, Minge sold the plantation to Mr. Thomas Wilcox who owned the land until his death in 1865, when it was sold to Mr. Joseph Allen of Richmond.[5] Currently, the land is owned and run by the Copland family, who are the descendants of John Minge.

Madison Agricultural Complex (Home Quarter). Over the past two years, the Montpelier Archaeology Department (with assistance from the 2004 and 2005 James Madison University Field School) has made an unexpected discovery of the core Madison-era agricultural complex (1770s-1844). It is located just down the hill from the new Visitor Center and in its day consisted of three slave quarters, a tobacco barn and work area, a crafts complex (workshops for carpenters and coopers), and encompassed over 15 acres.

The following fieldschool list includes announcements sent to me by the fieldschool directors and others listed on various directories. The fieldschool announcements that follow are presented below in alphabetic order by location, starting with those in North America, then two in the Caribbean, and one in Africa.

The Society for Georgia Archaeology is pleased to present a symposium on the material culture of Georgia's African-American past at its 2006 Spring meeting. This symposium brings together archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians to look at African-American life in Georgia through the landscapes, structures, crafts and objects that African-Americans created and employed. While African-American history was not well recorded, the material legacy of Georgia's African-American communities is particularly rich. Papers in this session will address the landscapes of African-American households and communities from plantations, tenant sites, and urban locations; African-American building techniques and architecture, including recent discoveries from the Ford Plantation and Ossabaw Island; African-American crafts and industry, including Colonoware, a pottery reflecting the interaction of African-American and Native Americans that is found on Colonial coastal plantations; and the archaeology of African-American sites, including excavations on both freed and enslaved sites, in both rural and urban locations, and from the Colonial era into the late 19th century. This will be a fascinating look at the African-American experience in the state and will present a number of projects and findings that have not been made public before.

In A Colony of Citizens, Laurent Dubois has given us a fascinating account of the revolution in Guadeloupe. The history of the abortive abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe has attracted some attention in French scholarly circles, thanks to the recently passed 2002 bicentennial of the re-imposition of slavery there.[1] To the extent that students of Latin America in the English-speaking world have noticed the revolutions in the French West Indies at all, the tendency has been to pay attention to the striking example of Saint-Domingue and assume that conditions in other colonies paralleled those found in the "pearl of the Antilles."

Laurent Dubois's work provides needed contrast to our easy over-generalization. For Guadeloupe was not Saint-Domingue. First, of course, the outcome was different -- Saint-Domingue's slaves became Haiti's citizens, peasant farmers, and sometime laborers in the first black republic. Meanwhile, Guadeloupe's slaves, after a brief, shining moment as "new citizens" of France, went back to slavery until 1848. Saint-Domingue's white rulers were slaughtered or driven out of the colony, to spend their declining years playing up their victimization at the hands of barbarous slave rebels and pressuring the French government for reimbursement for their lost "property." Guadeloupe's white ruling class forced the slaves back into their chains, returned to plantation farming, and to prosperity, for a while. And Saint-Domingue's intermediate class of free people of color, after vacillating between pressing for equal treatment within the plantation system and support for the black revolutionaries, generally took their place at the head of the rebel armies and entered the era of independence as a new ruling class. Guadeloupean free coloreds participated in the struggles for equal rights, first for their own class, then for all people of African descent. Ultimately, though, they were defeated and ended up being oppressed even more brutally than before the revolution.

A lot of the difference between these two outcomes can be ascribed to geography. Indeed, we who study Saint-Domingue are not unaware that things did not turn out so well in the Lesser Antilles, and if we think about it we generally just note that Guadeloupe is smaller and thus harder to defend from sea-borne attack. It is, but Victor Hugues managed to not only defend the island against the greatest naval power on earth at the time but to attack neighboring islands and give the British fits throughout the whole region. An explanation for the failure of the revolution in Guadeloupe required more analysis than it had been given. Laurent Dubois has provided that analysis.

For one thing, he points out, pre-Revolutionary Guadeloupe was not part of the core of the plantation complex, while Saint-Domingue was the most highly developed sugar island of the Caribbean. Dubois begins Colony of Citizens with a careful portrait of Guadeloupe under the ancien régime, using the sources of ancien régime social history, the notarials, parish registers, court records, and other government documents so meticulously maintained by the French colonial government. Guadeloupean slaves seem to have been neither so industrially organized, nor so strongly alienated from their production, as were slaves in northern Saint-Domingue, or elsewhere in the plantation Caribbean. This was to become important when unified resistance was essential.

Dubois pays great attention to the role of the ancien libres, those persons of African ancestry who were free before the revolution. Free coloreds were marginal people in all slave societies of the Americas, but seemingly they were more so in pre-revolutionary Guadeloupe than in Saint-Domingue. Free colored Guadeloupeans tended to be small-scale economic operators: artisans, merchants, or inter-island traders, peasant farmers, laborers, or, at best, owners of small cash-crop farms. In this, they were more like the free colored populations of the English Lesser Antilles than free coloreds in Saint-Domingue. Pre-revolutionary Guadeloupean free coloreds may thus have had a greater sympathy with the plight of the slaves than Dominguans. In any case, they played an important role in the developing political situation in Guadeloupe, some going on to become revolutionary leaders. One particularly interesting case that Dubois deals with extensively is the story of Louis Delgrès, leader of the resistance to re-imposition of slavery in 1802. Dubois's work recalls the story of Delgrès for the English-speaking world. Delgrès was recently rescued from two hundred years of obscurity in France with the re-naming of the historic fort in Guadeloupe after him and the erection of a plaque to his memory (across from that dedicated to Toussaint L'Ouverture) in the Panthéon in Paris. If there is an unqualified hero of this book it is Delgrès (although he does not make his first appearance until page 119). His story alone makes this book worth reading.

One major argument over the revolution in the French Caribbean is the degree to which it can be considered an outgrowth of the French revolution and to what extent it was a "revolution from below," in the words of Carolyn Fick's work on the Saint-Domingue slave uprising.[2] Dubois shows us that the two need not be mutually exclusive. Slaves and free people of color received and understood the ideas coming from France. They did not need white people from far away to tell them that freedom was better than slavery and democracy better than tyranny. They took advantage of the ideas of liberty and equality that were coming from the metropole to help frame and advance their own pre-existing claims. Dubois illustrates both the flow of ideas and the way Guadeloupeans of African descent made these ideas their own. In the 1793 slave uprising at Trois-Rivières, which forms the principal subject of the second part of Colony of Citizens, rebel leaders successfully claimed that their movement was directed against treacherous royalist whites, and escaped punishment. They took advantage of the Jacobin discourse that ascribed Royalist sympathies to the planter class, while at the same time refraining from attacking a plantation owned by a noted Jacobin. They avoided (for a time) the generally dismal fate of most slave rebels, with one individual subsequently becoming a free overseer on state plantations (before finally being shot by a Bonapartist firing squad).

The next part of Dubois's work shows how the ad-hoc conversion of slave rebels into loyal citizens of the republic in the Trois-Rivières uprising became state policy under the administration of Victor Hugues. Hugues was a figure with feet planted firmly on both sides of the divide: a former member of the slave-owning class in Saint-Domingue, he was also a committed Jacobin and leader of a revolutionary army. Citizens in a republic, according to the Jacobins, were supposed to sacrifice for the common good of the republic. The new citizens created by the emancipation edict of 1794 could make their most important contribution by producing cash crops to finance the republican state. So, Hugues was able to justify keeping the former slaves working on the plantations. Of course, the newly freed had a different idea of what liberté and égalité meant. Ultimately, the new citizens' refusal to keep working in the same way left the white colonial administrators with few arguments, or reasons, to oppose the re-imposition of slavery under Bonaparte.

It is interesting to contrast the relationship between the agricultural laborers and the Hugues administration with that which existed in Saint-Domingue between the Toussaint L'Ouverture administration and its agricultural workforce. Toussaint also required former slaves who had no other employment (e.g., typically military) to return to their plantations and work. Toussaint's laborers also resisted these orders as best they could, with actions from flight to sabotage to outright rebellion -- very similar to the reactions of slaves before the revolution. Toussaint crushed resistance with military force, executing troublemakers with little compunction -- even equating resistance to labor laws with treasonable support for the enemies of the Republic as Hugues did. Yet, when Bonaparte's troops came after 1802 to re-impose the slave system, Toussaint fought, alongside the former slaves. The resistance in Saint-Domingue was more or less universal, while, as Dubois points out, Guadeloupe's (white) administrators and substantial elements of the island's ruling class supported the re-imposition of slavery. In both cases, though, the agricultural laborers fought against a return to their old status. They, at least, could tell the difference between unpaid labor service to the state and chattel slavery, and preferred the former.

One role which new citizens and the Hugues administration both saw as crucial for the successful transformation of slaves into citizens was military service. Newly freed men rushed to join the armed forces of the Republic, both as infantrymen and as sailors on corsairs. Prior to the revolution, enslaved men could gain freedom through military service. During the period of emancipation, on the other hand, they justified their claim to the freedom they had already been accorded by being willing to fight for it. They were often the only people available to fill the ranks of the French armed forces, as white soldiers from the metropole could not penetrate the British blockade while local whites tended to be lukewarm in their support of the revolution. Republican armies in the eastern Caribbean were two-thirds black. Hugues was able to lead his armies on a rampage throughout the eastern Caribbean, seriously damaging British hegemony. The Peace of Amiens took away this important function that black men could fulfill and made it much easier to imagine turning them back into agricultural laborers.

The last part of Colony of Citizens is the sad story of how slavery was re-imposed in Guadeloupe. Some years ago, France celebrated the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the 1848 abolition of slavery, conveniently forgetting the abortive abolition of 1794-1802. Dubois's work recaptures this forgotten chapter, and shows how it played out in this peripheral French Caribbean colony. Peripheral or not, the story of Guadeloupe is important to our understanding of this period, if only because of the alternative viewpoint it gives those of us who study the somewhat happier story of Saint-Domingue. The savage repression of the re-enslaved in Guadeloupe, including even those who had supported the coming of Bonaparte's expedition, parallels the vicious brutality of the Leclerc regime in Saint-Domingue and shows why the Haitian rebels of 1802-03 fought so hard. And the persistent memory of freedom in Guadeloupe, despite all the efforts of Bonaparte's enforcers to obliterate it, restores one's faith in human freedom and dignity even in the midst of oppression and degradation.

Indeed, Dubois argues that this relatively peripheral rebellion deserves general attention because the modern concepts of human rights and human dignity were, in a sense, invented in the Caribbean. The anti-slavery struggle, both by the enslaved and by their liberal European champions, certainly drew inspiration from the struggle of Caribbean peoples for freedom during the eighteenth-century revolutions. There is a growing body of work on the impact of the Haitian Revolution on struggles against slavery throughout the Atlantic.[3] It is rather commonplace now to see the idea of global standards of human rights as a child of the abolition movement. Groups as diverse as the modern women's movement and anti-abortion protestors claim to be the heirs of the abolitionists. Guadeloupe's sufferings and defeat may be even more central to this tradition than Haiti's victory, since the Guadeloupean rebels never claimed to be anything but citizens of a French Republic in which equality and the liberty of all were respected. Thus Louis Delgrès set an example for Schoelcher, the architect of the 1848 abolition, and for all his heirs to this day.

On a more practical level, this book is very useful to scholars and teachers of the Caribbean and the Atlantic revolutions because of the wealth of sources that it draws upon. Saint-Domingue's public records, sadly, descend into a great silence starting about 1792. There are a few fragmentary books of notarial acts from the revolutionary period, and then very, very little for the early national period. In Guadeloupe, on the other hand, the French genius for accurate and complete (not to say excessive) record-keeping was faithfully exercised throughout the revolutionary period. Therefore, Dubois has a good deal to go on in telling the story of the Guadeloupean revolutionaries. He has plantation records maintained by the Republican administration. He has court records. He has records of births, deaths, marriages, name changes, deeds for land, manumissions of slaves, and the like. Thus, while students of the Haitian Revolution have to rely on letters from generals, other military records, and the occasional diary to reconstruct the changes in society that went on during the revolution, Dubois has the genuine article: the stuff of a proper social history.

In conclusion, I feel that A Colony of Citizens merits the attention, not only of a few readers in the rather limited field of French Caribbean studies, but of a broader audience interested in Atlantic revolutions, slavery and abolition, the genesis of human rights, or even just a mighty lively story.

Forty years after the publication of Daniel McCall's Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources, John Edward Phillips and a team of experts in different fields have produced Writing African History. This collection of essays is an attempt to update McCall's earlier work, acknowledging that African history and the disciplines that support its production have changed significantly in the last four decades. In general, the book is quite successful in presenting a comprehensive, yet not exhaustive, overview of some of the methods and sources employed by historians of Africa. It is prefaced with an introduction written by Daniel McCall wherein McCall describes the content and scope of the collected essays and places them in their historiographical context.

The body of the book is divided into four parts. The first part contains only one essay written by the editor -- Phillips -- introducing the question, "what is African history?" The majority of the text, however, is devoted to the more general question of what is history. Professional historians and advanced graduate students will find little new in this piece, but undergraduates and readers less familiar with the history as a discipline may find it useful.

The essays contained in the second part describe and explain the sources employed by historians in the writing of African history. The authors of these essays look not just at the sources but also at the diverse disciplines and methods that produce these materials. Here, the reader will find contributions that discuss the data coming from archaeology, historical linguistics, physical anthropology, and botany; as well as discussions on the collection and use of oral traditions and oral history, Arabic sources, and various types of European documents.

Some of these essays present an overview of the disciplines that produce particular kinds of data. For instance, in "Archaeology and the Reconstruction of the African Past", Susan Keech McIntosh presents a very useful description of the changes that have affected the discipline of archaeology as it pertains to Africa. This is followed by a clear and thoughtful explanation of the methods and concepts used by archaeologists, particularly notions of chronology and association. The objective of the author is to show historians that the valid use of archaeological data requires proper understanding of the ways in which that data has been produced. She also makes valuable suggestions about how historians can make better use of archaeological materials. For example, she proposes a number of questions that historians should consider when assessing archaeological evidence: have "recovery methods . . . been designed to detect and evaluate distortions of pre- and post-depositional processes? Has due attention been paid to questions of chronology and contemporaneity? Where analytical groupings are created have they been defined and inclusion criteria specified so that we may assess whether the entities created are indeed groups of individual things that can be fairly discussed together" (p. 63)? Using early iron technology research in the Termit region of Niger as a case study, she reminds us that a problem with radiocarbon testing is that it does not document an archeological event. Thus radiocarbon-acquired dates need to be linked, through other techniques (such as stratigraphy and association), to specific archaeological events. McIntosh acknowledges it can be hard-going sometimes, but "if you have begun to understand the material domain of time, you have the basic knowledge to evaluate the strength of an archaeological argument" and your history will be stronger for it (p. 80).

The essays on linguistics and physical anthropology, by Christopher Ehret and S. O. Y. Keita respectively, make similar presentations on those particular disciplines and are similarly effective. Ehret takes the reader step by step through the process of creating a linguistic stratigraphy that will uncover the "genetic" relationships between languages. He then continues to explain how words within specific languages become the "artifacts" for the historian. By following specific criteria on how to position particular words in the linguistic stratigraphy the historian may start to unveil stories of contact and exchange among different societies. He ends by using the history of the Nilo-Saharan family of African languages to illustrate these techniques.

S. O. Y. Keita focuses on skeletal biology, the area he thinks is most likely to make important contributions to African history. In his view, this sub-area will help the historian develop knowledge of what he calls lifeways, health and disease states, and population affinity and relationships. While acknowledging the limits of studying skeletal biology -- related to the availability and quality of samples and the challenges this poses for establishing a reliable periodization -- Keita describes, in great detail, the possibilities. Bones get imprinted with all kind of information about diet and activity, health and disease; by exploiting the insights offered by palaeopathology -- which have contributed greatly to historical debates on the origins of syphilis in the Americas and in the study of Egyptian and Peruvian mummies -- historians will be able to better grasp issues of human variation and population history. He discusses at length the history and development of the concept of race and the racial paradigm in the understanding of Africa's population, concluding that "race" is of no use in understanding the history of Africa's populations. Instead, he argues that, "the spatial patterning of DNA and serogenetic variant in living populations requires the use of evolutionary models and other considerations to infer the casual reasons for their distribution" (p. 144).

This section also includes two essays on oral sources, reflecting the importance of oral materials in the writing of African history. It also shows, however, that there are still many unresolved questions regarding the place of oral materials in the writing of history, and which historians must pay attention to. In "Oral Traditions as a Means of Reconstructing the Past," David Henige makes a strong case for the changes that need to take place to enhance and validate the collection and use of oral traditions by historians. Henige presents a clear-eyed description of the many problems that plague the practices of historians when it comes to the use of oral materials. He notes, in particular, the difficulty accessing materials collected by historians: "From the beginning, Africanist historians took to the field with notebooks and tape recorders, used them furiously -- or so we were to gather -- and wrote articles and books based on them. These contained a panoply of citations to interviews -- names, identifications, dates, places, sometimes even references to complex alphanumeric classification systems. And then nothing. Perhaps no more than 10 percent of the cases were the notebooks and/or field tapes deposited anywhere else than the historian's basement, attic, or office, despite the establishment of several depositories for this purpose" (p. 173). His assessment may be interpreted as yet another attack on the validity of oral sources, illustrating as it does a situation in which the materials in question cannot be used by other historians and thus, cannot be verified or challenged. However, his suggestions are pertinent and historians will do well in paying close attention to them. He proposes, for example, that given the limited opportunities to revisit oral data, more precautions should be taken at the time of collection. He explores issues that affect the value of oral sources such as miscommunication with informants, intercultural barriers, exploitative practices in the field, the performative nature of oral traditions, time limitations, and interference between the oral and the written. He concludes that: "To become fully operational, the use of oral data must encompass at least the deposit of raw materials with limited or no restriction on their use; accompanying details of interviewing and collecting techniques; and a full list of informants and formal questions. Until this happens, at a minimum, oral data cannot be regarded as full-fledged historical sources and can be disregarded without further ado" (p. 188).

Barbara Cooper's essay examines the broad debates that have shaped the development of oral history and its use among historians of Africa. She focuses on the centrality of oral materials in the definition and evolution of African history as a discipline. However, she also acknowledges that this emphasis has created a sense of isolation from the general field of history. Thus, despite the rich and exciting developments within African history, "the reality is that the methodological and conceptual challenges produced by African history have rendered it largely unintelligible to academic historians in general" (p. 211). She makes an important call to find ways of bridging this gap in a manner that allows African history to continue developing its own methods without sacrificing its ability to establish constructive dialogues with other fields. "The way out, I suggest, is to recast somewhat our sense of audience and become more self-conscious about the multitude of discourses about Africa that shape how our work is received" (p. 211).

I was very pleased to find that the discussion of interdisciplinary and oral sources does not exclude the examination of written ones. After all, these are just as important for the writing of African history and, in many cases, equally problematic. Essays on Arab and European sources by John Hunwick, John Thornton, and Toyin Falola close the third part of the book. Here, the authors present an inventory of available materials, a reflection on their potential, and a consideration of the problems they pose for historians attempting to interpret their significance.

This aforementioned third part of the book is devoted to discussing, describing and illustrating some of the approaches used in the writing of African history. Here the reader will find pieces on social history, economic history, art history, oral history, local history, world-systems analysis, Africans in the diaspora, history and memory, and women's history.

One is tempted to focus on the absence of valuable areas of study such as environmental or intellectual history. However, the volume does not pretend to be exhaustive and it would be unfair to expect it to cover all approaches to African history. Rather, these essays offer the reader a valuable sample of some of the approaches that have been put to good, productive use by historians of Africa.

Reading these essays, one appreciates how rich and diverse the field of African history has become. However, it is also evident that separately defining and delimiting all these areas of study is difficult and largely artificial. There is considerable overlap in theory and practice and the differences among them should always be seen as methodological shortcuts and not necessarily reflections of reality.

Each chapter uses a different strategy to illustrate the methods, objectives, benefits, and shortcomings of the historical approaches considered. Some present a straightforward description and discussion of particular areas of study. Such is the case with the essays on economic history, art history, and women's history. These articles carefully trace the evolution of these perspectives in the writing of African history and assess their achievements, challenges, and future potential.

Other authors choose to address head on the questions of definition and purpose of specific perspectives. Such is the case in the essay by Isaac Olawale Albert, "Data Collection and Interpretation in the Social History of Africa." Here the author explores the definition of social history and presents a critical examination of the work that has been produced in this area. He argues that historians have failed to put development at the center of their study of social history, and suggests that the analysis of the many problems that presently ail many African societies should be the starting point of any significant social history in Africa. Although some may find this definition of social history rather limited, it raises important questions on the use and practice of history inside and outside Africa, and on the connections between history and society. Historians must find ways of addressing these important issues in their work and Albert's essay offers a valuable starting point.

Finally, some authors present specific examples of historical work to illustrate particular approaches. In this group it is worth highlighting the essay on oral history contributed by Diedre L. Bádéjo. Bádéjo describes the importance of reexamining the epistemological tools used in the interpretation of Yoruba oral materials. She encourages historians to look to the Yoruba language as the main source for the understanding of Yoruba epistemology. This, she argues, will enable them to unlock the complex and diverse messages contained in the rich Yoruba oral forms.

The volume closes with a conclusion by Phillips which, like McCall's introduction, is a broadly sketched piece on the different steps involved in writing a historical piece. And like McCall's introduction it will probably be only of real interest to undergraduates and younger students of history.

Despite the often-quoted difficulties in achieving overall quality in edited collections, it is fair to say that the essays to this book are well written, well thoughtout, and very effective in describing the sources and methods used by historians of Africa. My main complaint is the lack of a more substantive conclusion. After the rich and stimulating presentations made by the contributors to the text, it would have been valuable to present an overall reflection on the state of the field. There are also a few typos and proofreading errors that should be corrected in further editions. Overall, this is a very useful book that is not just meant to celebrate the richness of African history but to critically reflect upon it. And it manages to do both.