Gilder Lehrman Center

Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has announced the finalists for the Twelfth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.

The finalists are: Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff for In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press); Siddharth Kara for Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (Columbia University Press); and Robert E. McGlone for John Brown's War Against Slavery (Cambridge University Press).

The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition is the most generous history prize in its field. The winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in, and the award will be presented at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 24, 2011.

This year's finalists were selected from a field of over eighty entries by a jury of scholars that included Edward Ball (Author and National Book Award Winner), Jeffrey Ferguson (Amherst College), and Martha Hodes (New York University).

The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. Previous winners are Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004; Laurent Dubois, 2005; Rebecca J. Scott, 2006; Christopher Leslie Brown, 2007; Stephanie Smallwood, 2008; and Annette Gordon-Reed, 2009.

The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the one-time slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the nineteenth century.

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World, by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff (University of California Press), tells the fascinating story of how enslaved Africans shaped and changed the landscape of the New World. With remarkable originality, the authors reveal how the men and women of the Middle Passage wielded their agricultural experience as part of the unending struggle to control their own lives. Interpreting archival evidence with both rigor and creativity, Carney and Rosomoff explore the provisioning of slave ships, the transfer and diffusion of African horticultural knowledge, the botanical gardens of slaves, and the gastronomic legacies of black slavery, among many other intriguing topics. Comprehensive and compelling, this is a work of truly global dimensions that narrates the ordeal of enslavement as a simultaneous story of food, memory, and survival.

Siddharth Kara's book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (Columbia University Press) carefully and compassionately convinces us to understand the phenomenon of modern-day human sex trafficking as part of the history of slavery and abolition. As an investigative reporter, Kara posed as a customer across Asia, Europe, and the United States, entangling himself with perpetrators and speaking confidentially with victims. Sidestepping sensationalism and absent any delusion of casting himself as a rescuer, Kara relates wrenching stories in lucid prose, thereby shedding a strong and steady beam of light on a widespread and ongoing global crime. With an exemplary mixture of courage and humility, the author combines a gripping first-person narrative with trenchant economic analysis and clear-eyed proposals for change. In the end, this book prevents us from consigning slavery to the past.

John Brown's War Against Slavery, by Robert E. McGlone (Cambridge University Press), tells a new version of the story of John Brown by taking on the most perplexing question of all: Why did John Brown carry out the raid at Harper's Ferry? With a fine balance of narration and interpretation, McGlone offers a meticulous re-creation of Brown's life, returning to old questions and asking new ones. No quest for seamless analysis, McGlone's story embraces complexity as he charts transformations in Brown's family alongside the shifting political world of the antebellum United States. This absorbing and learned book ultimately portrays a keen, compassionate, and conflicted abolitionist who made a purposeful decision to go forward with a plot that was sure to fail, but only in the most literal sense.

New Book

Social Archaeologies of Trade and Exchange:
Exploring Relationships among People, Places, and Things
Edited by Alexander A. Bauer and Anna S. Agbe-Davies
Left Coast Press, Hardcover
288 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1598740295, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery
Edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg
Yale University Press, Hardcover
264 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0300120424, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas
By Martin Munro
University of California Press, Hardcover
296 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0520262829, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Encyclopedia of African Religion
Edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama
Sage Publications, Hardcover
902 pp. in 2 vols., ISBN-13: 978-1412936361, 2009.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings of George Rawick
By George Rawick, edited and introduction by David Roediger
Charles H. Kerr, Paperback
194 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0882863184, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic
By Ana Lucia Araujo
Cambria Press, Hardcover
502 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1604977141, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Reading the World: An African Perspective on World History
By Kwasi Konadu
Diasporic Africa Press, Paperback
316 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0966020199, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm:
The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799-1851
By Winston James
New York University Press, Paperback
288 pp., 10 illus., ISBN-13: 978-0814742907, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora
By Henry Louis Jr. Gates
Basic Civitas Books, Hardcover
224 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0465014101, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850
By Frederick Knight
New York University Press, Hardcover
240 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0814748183, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

Looking for Angola

New College of Florida, January 15-16, 2011

Five Years of Looking for Angola: Accomplishments and New Objectives for the Public Anthropology Study of an early 19th-century Maroon Community on the Manatee River, Florida. Since 2005, an interdisciplinary research team has been seeking material remains of an early nineteenth-century maroon community in southern Tampa Bay. Angola is part of the larger history of self-emancipated Africans resisting slavery across the Florida Gulf Coast and ultimately finding freedom in Red Bays in the Bahamas (see http://www.diaspora.uiuc.edu/news0608/news0608-4.pdf for background).

The academic symposium includes presentations by the research team, discussions of the archaeological surveys and excavations on the Manatee River as well as historical background materials on the descendant community on Andros Island, the Bahamas, a public lecture, and site visits. The symposium is free; please register by emailing the New College Public Archaeology Lab (ncpal@ncf.edu) by December 5, 2010. The newly opened New College Public Archaeology Lab is committed to facilitating education, outreach, and the study of archaeology within a broader anthropological and interdisciplinary context.

New College of Florida is located in Sarasota, Florida. See http://www.ncf.edu/map-and-directions for directions. Any questions, please contact Uzi Baram, Associate Professor of Anthropology at New College of Florida: Baram@ncf.edu or 941-487-4217.

Since the 1988 centennial celebration of Abolition in Brazil the study of slavery and abolition has moved in new directions that have explored not only the role and voices of the slaves themselves, but also the important place of Brazil in the comparative history of slavery and of the African Diaspora. This conference will highlight the trends of current research and their implications for the history of slavery not only in Brazil, but in the Americas as a whole.

Participants Include: Angela Alonzo, Matthias Rohrig Assuncao, Mariana P. Candido, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Keila Grinberg, Mary C. Karasch, Herbert S. Klein, Silvia Hunold Lara, Douglas C. Libby, Paul E. Lovejoy, Beatriz G. Mamigonian, Jeffrey D. Needell, Richard Price, Joao Jose Reis, and Rebecca J. Scott. The conference is free and open to the public, but online pre-registration is required. For a complete conference schedule and to register, visit www.yale.edu/glc/brazil.

Co-sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center, the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization at Yale, the European Studies Council, the British Studies Program, and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; location: 34 Hillhouse Ave., Luce Hall Auditorium. This one-day conference is held in honor of James Walvin, one of the great scholars of the Transatlantic slave trade, and a pioneer in the unearthing the history of Black Britain. Walvin’s extensive career has included work at universities in Barbados, Australia, Britain, Africa, and here at Yale, where he has held various fellowships, including a recent one at the Yale Center for British Art. Additionally, Jim Walvin was the British government advisor for the abolition celebrations in 2007, and he has recently been instrumental in developing a collaborative seminar with the Gilder Lehrman Center for educators in the U.S. the U.K, and West Africa to explore the history of the Middle Passage. This conference will bring together scholars from across the U.S., Britain, and the Caribbean to celebrate Walvin’s considerable work in the field. The conference is free and open to the public, but online pre-registration is required. For a complete conference schedule and to register, visit http://www.yale.edu/glc/walvin/ or call 203-432-3339.

The State of African American Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy, and Research

New York City, January 6-8, 2011

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean at the City University of New York extend a call for papers for their regular conference on the state of scholarship in African American Studies. Entitled, The State of African American Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy, and Research, the conference will take place on January 6-8, 2011 at the Schomburg Center, located at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, located at 365 Fifth Avenue. Complete panels and individual paper submissions related to the theme -- broadly conceived -- are invited from scholars and graduate students. In addition to papers in your academic areas of expertise, and on teaching and research methodologies, are particularly welcome submissions on labor, community engagement, gender, sexuality, visual culture, and relations in the disapora.

Proposals should be submitted electronically and must include your name, title of the paper, panel, or roundtable, and an abstract of 150 words. They should also include the institutional affiliation of each presenter, phone numbers, and email addresses. Submit proposals by November 1, 2010 to: Aisha al-Adawiya, State of African American Studies, Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York NY 10037-1801, E-mail: aaladawiya@nypl.org, web http://www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg.

The Triangle African-American History Colloquium announces its fifth annual New Perspectives on African-American History and Culture Conference, with the theme of "Intersecting Identities in African American History and Culture." The Conference Committee invites proposals for single papers or complete session panels related to the themes of identity and intersectionality in African American history and culture, across a range of time periods, areas, and disciplines. Though race has been one of the principal categories of analysis in the study of black historical experiences, multiple identities -- including, but not limited to, gender, class, sexual, and regional identity -- have shaped African American lives. Exploring the intersections of identities broadens scholarly investigations and places our studies of African American history and culture in more nuanced and comparative contexts. This conference seeks to address questions such as: "How have African Americans used and experienced identity in their history and lives? How have various kinds of identity shaped the lives and history of African Americans?"

Topics of exploration on identity and intersectionality in African American history and culture might include: feminist and women's history; sexuality and sexual orientation; multiple racial or ethnic identities; religious identities; migration and shifting regional identity; political ideologies; and myriad others. Papers on any topic that relates to the conference theme are welcome.

The deadline for proposals is Monday, November 1, 2010. Respond via email to bdp@email.unc.edu with your name, institution, title, email address, proposed paper title, a 150-word abstract, and curriculum vitae. Please put "Conference Proposal" in your subject line. The conference paper itself should have a historical focus and be a maximum of ten pages in length, not including endnotes and/or bibliography. Presentations will be limited to twenty minutes. Contact Information: Bradley Proctor Ph.D. Candidate Department of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, email bdp@email.unc.edu.

The Association for African American Historical Research and Preservation (AAAHRP) is now accepting proposals for topics concerning Black history, culture and genealogy for its one-day Black History Conference which will be held on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM), Seattle, Washington.

With this, our 6th Black History Conference, AAAHRP continues to narrow the gap between historians and the public by encouraging cooperation among university-based scholars, librarians, historic preservationists, museum professionals, students, and the general public. The conference theme is "Black History at Home and Abroad: Uncovering the Past." We welcome the submission of proposals for individual papers, complete sessions, panels, workshops, and roundtables. The AAAHRP Conference Committee is particularly interested in proposals for innovative presentations about the African Diaspora Around the World. Other subjects of particular interest include, but are not limited to: America and a Post Racial Society; Black Pioneers of the Pacific Northwest; Black Radical Organizations; Black Women Unrecognized in History Books; Blacks and the Military; Civil Rights Organizations: Are They Still Relevant?; Early Human Rights and Civil Rights Activists; Forgotten Black Leaders of Past Centuries; Intellectuals and Literary Figures, Playwrights and Artists; Marcus Garvey and His Movement.

Presentation guidelines: Individual paper presentations should be approximately 20 minutes long and should be original works of scholarship that have not been presented or published elsewhere. Paper sessions should include 3-4 papers. Panels, workshops, and roundtables should be approximately 90 minutes long. Proposals of 250-300 words are being accepted until October 15, 2010. They should be sent electronically to history3@comcast.net with "2011 Conference Proposal" as the subject. For additional information contact Ed Diaz at history3@comcast.net. To learn more about the Association for African American Historical Research and Preservation visit www.aaahrp.org. For information about the the Northwest African American Museum visit www.naamnw.org.

North Carolina Central University invites proposals for the third annual African Diaspora Studies Symposium, to be held March 19-20, 2011. The theme for this year is "Conspicuously Unseen: Invisibility and Denial in Diasporic Communities." The symposium seeks to explore the ways that Diasporic communities see themselves and the ways that they are perceived by the dominant cultures that surround them. Special attention will be given to the Afro-Latin American, Afro-European, and Afro-Asian experience, though any topic within the Diaspora will be considered. In keeping with the breadth of the Liberal Arts, we seek proposals for papers, panels, performances (music or theater), film, and graphic art from any branch of Diaspora studies. The symposium has typically brought together scholars, activists, and artists, representing disciplines as varied as Public Health and performance art. We look forward to continuing this tradition, bringing together academics, community members, and creative artists to engage with each other on issues facing the African Diaspora and African Diaspora Studies. North Carolina Central University, located in the heart of Durham, was founded in 1910 and is the first state-supported liberal arts institution to serve the black community. The University prides itself on its relations with the Durham community, and the NCCU African Diaspora Studies Symposium encourages input and participation from both academics and the community.

Papers and submission: Individual abstracts should be 250 words or less and panel abstracts should be 750 words or less. Abstracts should be submitted by Wednesday, December 15, 2010. Please include, for all participants, a five-line biography with institutional/organizational affiliation and contact information. Please direct all submissions to Youssef J. Carter at youssefcarter@gmail.com and Joshua Nadel at jnadel@nccu.edu. This two-day symposium is free and open to the public. It will be held on the campus of North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC on March 19 and 20, 2011. For more information contact: Joshua Nadel, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of History Associate Director, Global Studies Program, North Carolina Central University, 1801 Fayetteville St. Durham NC 27707, Phone: (919) 530-6367, Fax: (919) 530-5392, jnadel@nccu.edu.

This is a call for papers for an interdisciplinary conference on enslavement, bondage and the environment in the Indian Ocean World (from Africa to the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and the Far East). A wide range of themes will be considered, including the following: the process of enslavement; natural disasters and enslavement; man-made disasters and enslavement; debt and enslavement; the slave trade; slavery; forced labour; migration and enslavement; the economy of servitude; the sex profile of servitude; collective enslavement; race and enslavement; religion and enslavement; and agency in servitude.

Deadline for submission of abstracts (one paragraph) is September 30, 2010. Responses will be distributed by October 1, 2010. Deadline for submission of accepted papers in English or French (max. 10,000 words in MS Word) is February 15, 2011. The conference will follow the Avignon model. Papers will be distributed in advance. Authors do not read their papers. Sessions will be organised according to theme and will take the form of a discussion led by a discussant. Kindly include with your abstract: full name; institution; professional title; full postal address; email; designation as either an academic or a student registrant. Contact: Lori Callaghan, Peterson Hall, McGill University, 3460 McTavish Street, Room 100, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1X9, Tel: 514.398.6204, http://www.indianoceanworldcentre.com.

The Black Women's Intellectual and Cultural History Collective (BWICH) is seeking paper submissions for a broad-ranging conference on black women's contributions to black thought, political mobilization, creative work and gender theory. We are interested in work on any time period that explores black women as intellectuals across a broad geography including Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America, and Europe. BWICH aims to piece together a history of black women's thought and culture that maps the distinctive concerns and historical forces that have shaped black women's ideas and intellectual activities. To this end, we are interested in paper exploring subjects including, but not limited to, the genealogy of black feminism, the patterns of women's leadership and ideas about religious culture and politics, the scientific work of black women, the economic ideas of black women, the politics of black women's literature, and the history of black women's racial, sexual or social thought. We encourage submissions from scholars of all ranks, and any relevant discipline.

Accepted papers will be featured at a conference on the Intellectual History of Black Women in New York City on April 28-30. The conference is sponsored by Columbia University's Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, which will also cover the participants' travel and lodging expenses. Submissions are due no later than October 15th, 2010, and should include a one-page abstract of the projected paper, as well as short C.V. Paper proposals and C.V.s should be submitted by email to: bwhichconference@gmail.com.

BWICH is an interdisciplinary, collaborative effort dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects. We aim to encourage scholarship on black women's intellectual activities among a diverse and enduring community of senior and junior scholars, whose intellectual exchanges will cross generations and foster a scholarly tradition that outlives this particular project.

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) proudly announces the creation of Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies. Designed to connect Black Studies scholarship with the Digital Revolution in the Age of Communication, Fire!!! serves as a contemporary conduit through which Black Studies knowledge can be distributed. The journal's unique contribution is the use of the digital world in providing a peer-reviewed venue for scholars who utilize multimedia evidence to advance their theories and interpretations.

Fire!!! is a multi-disciplinary journal that serves primarily the social sciences, arts, and humanities. The journal welcomes research that crosses the lines of traditional disciplines and focuses on contemporary issues that expand the intellectual realm of Black Studies. Our goal is to use media to increase the kinds of primary evidence that can be brought to bear to expand knowledge.

Fire!!! is interested in obtaining articles, review essays, and reviews for its February and August 2011 issues. All articles and review essays should be between 7,500 and 12,000 words. The maximum file size for each (including media) is 10 mb. Fire!!! publishes reviews of feature films and documentaries, audio recordings, theatrical productions, websites, museum exhibits, and books relevant to teaching courses on Black life, history, and culture. Scholars interested in submitting reviews should contact the editors before submitting. Fire!!! will be distributed to institutional libraries through JSTOR. If you are interested in contributing to this cutting-edge publication visit our website for submission guidelines. www.fire-jbs.org. Questions? Contact the editors at editors@fire-jbs.org.

Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes cutting edge interdisciplinary scholarship and creative work by and about women of the African Diaspora and their communities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. A partnership between Vanderbilt University's African American and Diaspora Studies Program and the State University of New York (SUNY) Press, the goal of Palimpsest is to engender further explorations of the Black International as a liberation narrative; and Black Internationalism as an insurgent consciousness formed over and against retrogressive practices embodied in slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, from the early modern period to the present.

Drawing on the traditions of African diasporic studies and feminist/womanist thought, the journal will feature analyses of Black women's histories, experiences, and cultural productions. More specifically, we solicit work that considers the intersections of race, class, gender, color, and sexuality in the histories, social and political movements, expressive cultures, spiritual formations, and philosophical thoughts of women as well as the ways in which women locate themselves, and have been located, on the map of human geography. Scholars from a broad range of disciplines are encouraged to contribute, and a primary consideration for inclusion will be an essay's capacity to resonate with and critically engage the interdisciplinary fields of African American and Diaspora studies and women's and gender studies.

Call for Papers: In keeping with Palimpsest's mission, the inaugural issue will focus on the theme: Liberations Across Boundaries. The Board nonetheless encourages submissions that broadly address this theme as well as others that are in line with the journal's general mission. While submissions for Palimpsest are accepted on a rolling basis, those wishing to contribute to the inaugural volume will need to submit essays by February 2011 for full consideration. Website and Submission Guidelines Information: www.vanderbilt.edu/aframst/palimpsest; inquiries: PalimpsestJournal@vanderbilt.edu.

In Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies, Michael Olmert takes readers into the backyards behind the great houses of the Chesapeake. In these spaces behind the homes of the wealthy, Olmert illuminates a world where the sometimes dirty work of food preparation, the clean work of dairying and laundering, and the necessary work of the necessary was carried out. The book's main argument is that we should take these buildings seriously, because they can teach us about the society that built them. Olmert lays out the reasons convincingly, and with great skill, and in the process provides a valuable service to general readers and scholars alike. Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies is beautiful, thoroughly researched, and written with grace and humor.

The book begins by asserting that "every building is a text" (p. 1). Historians of material culture have been laboring under this assumption for some time, but Olmert phrases it in a concise and, as far as I can tell, original manner.[1] If buildings are texts, then they are fair game for interpretation by a wide range of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. When considering artifacts of the past, in fact, a fluid, interdisciplinary approach works well. Olmert is ideally positioned for such an approach: he teaches English literature at the University of Maryland, writes for television (and wins Emmys), and has authored numerous magazine articles as well as The Official Guidebook to Colonial Williamsburg (1985). Many of the outbuildings treated in the book are in Williamsburg, where Olmert has accumulated a wealth of experience and knowledge.

After an introduction that defines terms and frames the general goal of the project, which is to find out what we can learn about eighteenth-century America from its surviving outbuildings, the book consists of eight chapters, each treating a specific sort of structure: kitchens, laundries, smokehouses, dairies, privies, offices, dovecotes, and icehouses. The work concludes with two appendices, each a meditation on a prevalent shape in early American architecture: octagons and hexagons.

The chapters work well together, but any one of them could stand alone and prove a useful, discussion-provoking addition to a history, English, archaeology, or art history syllabus. Each chapter probes the deep roots of the building, picking out references to the structure in English and American literature. Every chapter contains a wealth of detail about the surviving examples of its particular sort of building in the Chesapeake. Olmert also accounts for how the buildings were used. In this project, he is aided by those who practice "archaeology by experiment," trying to understand the past through using its "materials, tools, and techniques" (p. 9).

Each chapter fascinates and contains valuable insights. Readers may be surprised to learn that it was social distinction more than fire safety that moved Chesapeake kitchens apart from the main house. This way, the hard work of preparing meals was physically separated from the pleasure of consuming them. We also learn the right methods for cleaning the various fabrics worn in the eighteenth century, salting and smoking meat, and making such beverages as Everlasting Syllabub and Syllabub from the Cow (mixtures of wine and milk, and hard cider and milk directly from a cow's teat, respectively). The privy chapter narrates substantial differences, and even some similarities, between eighteenth-century notions of privacy and appropriate bathroom behavior and our own. Bathroom reading was known in early America, though being alone in the privy was apparently a rare luxury, as many privies contained multiple seats, and some even had lower benches for children. Though most of the outbuildings were private, offices occupied a space in between. Most had a public room for meeting prospective business partners or clients, and then a more cluttered chamber where the papers were pushed. The dovecote chapter outlines the myriad uses of doves: "Imagine an engine that provides an endless supply of goods and produce -- meat, eggs, down, fertilizer, and even gunpowder" (p. 173). Wealthy eighteenth-century Americans might use ice to chill bottles, but would probably not put pieces of the frozen Potomac into their beverages. Snow might do the trick, though. The two appendices, on octagons and hexagons, are reminiscent of John Demos's Circle and Lines (2004), and reinforce the notion that we would do well to consider the cultural patterns and beliefs buried so deep that people felt no need to explain them to posterity. The book would have benefited from a formal conclusion that drew the various chapters together.

Backyards were scenes of struggle and negotiation. Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies does not avoid this fact, and Olmert mentions slavery, servitude, and other forms of inequality at various points throughout, but these might have featured more prominently. The influence of John Michael Vlach's Back of the Big House (1993) is evident in the introduction, and Olmert notes that "the culture of outbuildings was made possible by vast class differences, economic hardships, servitude, and slavery" (p. 1). Readers get a lot about what went on in the buildings, but less about what they meant to the people who worked in them. Of course, many of these stories are unrecoverable and the result would be speculative. But recent work by Anthony Kaye, author of Joining Places (2007), has shown that much can be done to recover the differences in the ways slaves and owners perceived space.

A certain class of sticklers is likely to be disappointed that Olmert eschews traditional footnotes or endnotes in favor of a "Notes & Further Reading" section at the end of each chapter. All of the book's sources, both primary and secondary, however, are clear, and the short bibliographic essays allow Olmert to demonstrate his knowledge of the literature and to draw attention to the people who helped him in more informal ways, such as demonstrating eighteenth-century dairying techniques.

Most American history teachers have probably come across the images archived as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey.[2] Perhaps the starkly beautiful black-and-white photographs have accompanied your in-class presentations, allowing students to witness past architectural developments at the same time as they confirm your good taste in photography? Scores of photographs, many drawn from the survey, grace the pages of Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies and drive home Olmert's points in a visually striking manner. Older engravings, paintings, and floor plans round out the volume's illustrations.

Olmert's writing style is one of the great strengths of the book. It is at once learned and savvy when it comes to modern times (Tony Soprano and global warming appear in the introduction), and very, very funny. Olmert quotes Ivor Noël Hume lamenting our limited knowledge of Williamsburg "pisspottery," and declares grandly of the elite necessaries: "these are not spartan quarters for unspeakable acts, but prestige surroundings in which the movers and shakers of bygone societies still demonstrate the reach of their power and control. These are throne rooms" (pp. 129, 143). Olmert's work is a combination of serious scholarly inquiry and fun that is all too rare in the academic world.

Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies deserves wide readership, and deserves a spot on the shelf with James Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten, Leland Ferguson's Uncommon Ground (1992), and Vlach's aforementioned work.[3] Like these works, Olmert's borrows liberally from the best that historians, literary scholars, and archaeologists have to offer, and rests on thorough research. "Outbuildings talk to us," Olmert reminds us in the introduction (p. 9). That is true, but it helps to have a skilled interpreter like Olmert to tell us what they have to say.

In Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, Kay Dian Kriz seeks to explore the relationship between British society and the Caribbean by looking at visual representations of the West Indies and slavery. Kriz begins by emphasizing the need for art historians to recognize the ways in which the production of art in Britain depended on the circulation of goods, ideas, people, and money around the world. She is also particularly keen to trace the role of visual culture in the creation of a "culture of refinement" during the period of her study. She argues that the idea of "refinement," which was linked to notions of "civility" and "purity," was assessed and judged via pictorial representations of the Caribbean and of people associated with the region. Those from the metropole tended to represent the colonial periphery of the empire and its nonwhite inhabitants as rude and unrefined, although Kriz also demonstrates that these binary oppositions were never firmly set. By addressing these themes, this book helps to provide new perspectives on empire and Englishness during the long eighteenth century.

The book is divided into five substantive chapters, each of which look at the work of individual artists or groups of artists. Kriz does not seek to provide a narrative or comprehensive overview of the development of visual representations of the Caribbean. Rather, her chapters act as case studies. Each casts light on a specific moment in the history of Britain's relationship with the Caribbean, while strands of analysis seek to link the chapters together, highlighting continuities, tensions, and changes.

The first substantive chapter focuses on the illustrations in Sir Hans Sloane's "Voyage to Jamaica", which was first published at the end of the seventeenth century, before Britain had emerged as the predominant European power in the Atlantic region. Kriz draws attention to the ways in which fears about the dangers and strangeness of the tropical outer-reaches of an expanding empire were expressed in images of flora, fauna, and human artifacts. She provides nuanced analyses of imagery that represented threatening animals, such as crabs and jellyfish, as well as artifacts, such as Spanish coins. These, she argues, echoed the violent struggles of conquest, imperial conflict, and enslavement that had come to be associated with the islands of the Caribbean.

This is a lavishly illustrated book, and some of the most striking of the color prints are to be found in the second chapter, which considers the work of the Italian artist Agostino Brunius, who worked on the island of Dominica during the 1760s. Kriz looks at the ways in which Brunius depicted free mixed-race women in his paintings of Dominica, arguing that he presented these typically Caribbean people as both seductive and desirable. Although Kriz does not do much to examine the types of sexual relations that white European sojourners like Brunius often enjoyed with such women, she fully explores how such paintings presented viewers with a celebration of West Indian life. Indeed, throughout Sugar, Slavery, and the Culture of Refinement, Kriz provides valuable, and overdue, analysis of pro-colonial and proslavery culture both before and after the rise of organized abolitionism. This helps to ensure that the book not only broadens our appreciation of the importance of visual culture to metropolitan understandings of the Caribbean but also provides new perspectives on the debates over the region that raged throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Kriz argues convincingly that visual representations of the West Indies and of black people often served both to defend slavery and to reinforce racial thinking. For example, in chapter 3, she considers the use of humor in prints depicting the Caribbean and enslaved people in the period immediately before the abolition of the slave trade, highlighting the lines of connection that linked the burgeoning field of racial science with the cartoons and low comedy that accompanied debates over abolition. Some of these themes are continued in the fourth chapter, which explores Isaac Belisario's Sketches of Character, a series of twelve lithographs depicting ordinary people in Jamaica at the point of full emancipation in the late 1830s. The implication of Kriz's careful analysis of art during the era of abolitionism seems to be that although the antislavery movement achieved its political aim of ending slavery, the debates over slaveholding and emancipation invoked racialized stereotypes, in both texts and images, which fueled ideas about black racial inferiority that persisted and developed in the wake of emancipation.

In chapter 5, Kriz considers landscape painting in the period between 1825 and 1840, examining the ways in which the artist James Bartholomew Kidd portrayed health and disease in his pictures of Jamaica. In some ways, the themes of this final chapter echo those of the first, focusing on depictions of the natural world. However, while Sloane depicted the natural hazards of Jamaica, such artists as Kidd sought to "detoxify" the Jamaican landscape, counteracting the image of the island as "the white man's grave" and presenting it as a place where white settlers could survive and thrive, in spite of the economic challenges presented by the ending of slavery. Kriz argues that Kidd achieved this, in part, by introducing "respectable" white women to his paintings of rural Jamaican scenes and by emphasizing the civility and modernity of the white colonists. In these ways, his work was an exercise in what Kriz calls "damage control": like other examples of West Indian visual culture, Kidd's paintings sought to rebuff metropolitan critics of white colonial life, presenting Jamaica as a viable place in which to settle, make a profit, and live in respectability and "refinement."

Sugar, Slavery, and the Culture of Refinement, therefore, opens new ways of understanding those on either side of the Atlantic Ocean who produced and consumed pictorial representations of the West Indies during the period between the late seventeenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. In her carefully observed studies of various images, Kriz casts important light on the desires, fears, and cultural values of various artists and their publics. Throughout the book, the case studies are all analytically rich, and Kriz provides readers with a uniquely well-informed and astute series of insights into the images under discussion. Throughout the book, she displays an impressive eye for detail and meaning. Nevertheless, at times, the search for meaning in the pictures might have been better matched with analysis that placed them in the broad context of political, social, and economic change within the British Atlantic. Such analysis is not entirely lacking, but might have featured more heavily, particularly in the conclusion, especially since the pieces studied in the book tell us so much about the rise and fall of British slaveholders, white West Indian culture, the triumph and discontents of abolitionism, and the passage from slavery to freedom. Such connections, however, will not be lost on the many scholars who will turn to this book, and Kriz's work will receive a warm welcome from the growing community of scholars with interests in British art, the Atlantic world, slavery, and the history of empire.

Laurent Dubois eloquently tells the story of the Haitian Revolution, from the Old Regime to Haitian independence in 1804. The Haitian Revolution is important to world history in many ways. It was the first independent Latin American nation and the second independent country in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. More significantly, it serves as a strong indication of the radicalism of the eighteenth century. The Haitian Revolution turned the world as known at that time upside down, as former slaves came to govern a former European colony in the Caribbean. Although this significant event has been a long-neglected topic, Dubois does contribute to and moves beyond a limited existing historiography, including the works of such authors as C. L. R. James (The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution [1938]), Thomas Ott (The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804 [1973]), and Carolyn Fick (The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below [1990]). Avengers of the New World coincided with the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution in 2004, and potentially reaches a broader audience through its readability, style, and sentiment.

Dubois stresses that the revolution did not spontaneously occur one fateful day; during the centuries leading up to the revolution, many factors contributed to the future of the colony. Various tensions existed among the population of Saint-Domingue, which fermented over time. Dubois explains this background in the first three cleverly title chapters, "Specters of Saint-Domingue," "Fermentation," and "Inheritance." The specters that haunted Saint-Domingue included the indigenous Tainos, privateers, Christopher Columbus and his expeditions, previous uprisings, white colonists taken by disease, and slaves defeated by the institution of slavery. Absentee owners demanded production from the overseers within the colonies, resulting in resentment and abuse of power and slaves. Although the colony operated under different conditions than the metropole, Paris dictated the laws for Saint-Domingue. White colonists began to crave autonomy. The dependency on slave drivers by the overseers created a hierarchy among the slaves, most of who were African-born. Development of cultural unity through Creole language and religion, coupled with the concentrations of Africans from particular geographic regions, allowed for organization. Free people of color, particularly those of mixed European and African ancestry, inherited great wealth, limited autonomy, and slavery -- many free people of color owned plantations and slaves. Yet they did not inherit French citizenship and equal rights to the white colonists.

Despite popular beliefs, the Haitian Revolution was not just a slave uprising. It was a "transcultural movement" (p. 5). There were three overlapping revolutions within what is collectively titled the Haitian Revolution: a challenge to imperial authority by white colonists, the fight for racial equality by free people of color, and an end to slavery through the mass slave revolt. After the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, white colonists recognized an opportunity to revise the administration of the colony, some even calling for secession from France. Free people of color attempted to obtain new rights through the revolution. Dubois implicates these free people of color as similar to the Third Estate in France--perhaps even an equivalent. The most significant element of the revolution was the slave uprising in August 1791, to which Dubois devotes the bulk of the text. Whites fled the revolt; therefore, France sent commissioners to return peace to the colony, eventually resulting in universal emancipation in 1794. However, this did not end the revolution. The surviving black leaders on the island continued to battle for power. In 1800, Toussaint Louverture took control of the island, including Santo Domingo to the East, which the Spanish had ceded to France in 1795. In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Charles Leclerc to remove Louverture from power through a three-stage plan. The French army successfully removed Louverture, but the ex-slaves, fearing the reinstitution of slavery, willingly fought to the death to maintain their freedom. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence.

Inspired by the words of early historian and philosopher Louis Sebastien Mercier, who predicted a slave uprising (1771), and revolutionary leader Dessalines (1804), Dubois symbolically titled his book "Avengers of the New World". In many ways, this book avenges Haiti's history by resituating the revolution within greater contexts, including Atlantic history. Dubois highlights the enlightened, not barbaric, culture in Saint-Domingue leading up to the revolution. He describes the multivolume history of the island undertaken by Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de St. Méry as a "classic Enlightenment project" (p. 10). He also notes the scientific exploration in Saint-Domingue by the Cercle de Philadelphes, a colonial learned society founded in 1785, and the ascension of the first balloon over the Americas in 1784, only one year after France had done so across the Atlantic. One of his primary sources is a colonial newspaper founded in 1791, the Moniteur Général de la Partie Française de Saint-Domingue. In addition to the Enlightenment activities in the colony, Dubois explains how the Haitian Revolution was not a response to the French Revolution, but a vital part of the larger "Age of Revolution." Dubois asserts, "The slaves of Saint-Domingue who had helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution would ultimately make it their own, and even surpass it, in their own struggle for liberty" (p. 21). Despite the necessary use of racial terminology within the book, such as "gens de couleur" and "petits blancs," Dubois cautions against the employment of race to generalize or simplify the complexities of the revolution, because "complicated ideological and political forces often divided groups that we might be tempted to see as unified by 'race'" (p. 6).

Although not based on archival research, Dubois's detail and analysis of printed primary and secondary sources successfully challenge some long-accepted myths within European and North American historiography regarding the Haitian Revolution. One such myth is of the religious ceremony at Bois-Caïman, where slaves planned the initial slave uprising of the Haitian Revolution. Only one written account of the event exists, but it is from the negative perspective of a white surgeon, Antoine Dalmas, who fled to the United States. Yet many historians have attempted to study the ceremony, from arguing for its veracity (James in his "Black Jacobins") to doubting its existence (David Patrick Geggus in Haitian Revolutionary Studies [2002]).[1] Through an analysis of Dalmas's account and a synthesis of the existing secondary literature, Dubois explains the importance of Bois-Caïman as a symbol in Haitian revolutionary history. He writes, "Thus Bois-Caïman remains a symbol of the achievement of the slave insurgents of Saint-Domingue, a symbol not of a specific event whose details we can pin down, but rather of the creative spiritual and political epic that both prompted and emerged from the 1791 insurrection" (p. 102). Like Dalmas's account, the other sources used by Dubois are available in published form. His primary sources range from an official report recorded by Jean-Philippe Garran-Coulon to the Philadelphia General Advertiser. Perhaps an archival source-based study could add to the informative efforts of Dubois.

Dubois includes a thoughtful epilogue, "Out of the Ashes," which explains the ramifications of the revolution for Haiti and the world around it." "After independence, Haiti scarcely experienced peace, because some of the promises of the revolution remained unfulfilled. For slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists throughout the Atlantic, the Haitian Revolution was inspirational. Some of these people left record of their inspired efforts, such as Frederick Douglass and Victor Schoelcher. Dubois writes, "Through such writings, through conversations, through rumors and nightmares and dreams, those who died for and lived through the Haitian Revolution became part of every society in the Atlantic world. They continue to speak to us, as founders in a long struggle for dignity and freedom that remains incomplete" (p. 306).