The Creole Affair


Book Description

The Creole Affair is the story of the most successful slave rebellion in American history, and the effects of that rebellion on diplomacy, the domestic slave trade, and the definition of slavery itself. Held against their will aboard the Creole—a slave ship on its way from Richmond to New Orleans in 1841—the rebels seized control of the ship and changed course to the Bahamas. Because the Bahamas were subject to British rule of law, the slaves were eventually set free, and these American slaves' presence on foreign soil sparked one of America's most contentious diplomatic battles with the UK, the nation in control of those remote islands. Though the rebellion appeared a success, the ensuing political battle between the United States and Britain that would lead the rivals to the brink of their third war, was just beginning. As such, The Creole Affair is just as importantly a story of diplomacy: of two extraordinary non-professional diplomats who cleverly resolved the tensions arising from this historic slave uprising that, had they been allowed to escalate, had the potential for catastrophe.




Rebellious Passage


Book Description

Examines the successful slave revolt aboard the US slave ship Creole during the early 1840s and its consequences.




No More!


Book Description

Combines first-person historical accounts, traditional black spirituals, and passages about the daily lives of slaves to provide a chronicle of slavery in America.




The Ideology of Creole Revolution


Book Description

This book explores the surprising similarities in the political ideas of the American and Latin American independence movements.




One Good Affair


Book Description

With her gift for “surprising emotional honesty…[and] an impressive ability to get inside the heads of [her characters],”* Tess Stimson grips readers with this internationally bestselling novel of six lovers, two marriages, one affair—and what happens when a lifetime of secrets begins to unravel. Ella Stuart is a pediatrician with a fulfilling career and a marriage any woman would envy. William Ashfield is a devoted husband, a good father, and a successful businessman. Beth Ashfield married the love of her life and loves him still, but the light inside her is going out and she has one last chance to rekindle it. And Cate, Beth and William’s brilliant but troubled teenage daughter, is trying to negotiate the rough waters between adolescence and womanhood. But when tragedy strikes, the repercussions spiral through all of their lives—and in an instant, nothing will ever be the same. Now Ella, William, Beth, and Cate will discover that trying to have it all might be keeping them from the very thing they each want most…. With sharp wit and moving honesty, Tess Stimson has written a brazenly unsentimental yet deeply felt novel of hearts gone astray that somehow keep the faith—even when everyone seems to be cheating. *Publishers Weekly




Language and Slavery


Book Description

This posthumous work by Jacques Arends offers new insights into the emergence of the creole languages of Suriname including Sranantongo or Suriname Plantation Creole, Ndyuka, and Saramaccan, and the sociohistorical context in which they developed. Drawing on a wealth of sources including little known historical texts, the author points out the relevance of European settlements prior to colonization by the English in 1651 and concludes that the formation of the Surinamese creoles goes back further than generally assumed. He provides an all-encompassing sociolinguistic overview of the colony up to the mid-19th century and shows how ethnicity, language attitude, religion and location had an effect on which languages were spoken by whom. The author discusses creole data gleaned from the earliest sources and interprets the attested variation. The book is completed by annotated textual data, both oral and written and representing different genres and stages of the Surinamese creoles. It will be of interest to linguists, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and anyone interested in Suriname.




Dixie Bohemia


Book Description

In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends -- ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer -- and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age. Reed begins with Faulkner and Spratling's self-published homage to their fellow bohemians, "Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles." The book contained 43 sketches of New Orleans artists, by Spratling, with captions and a short introduction by Faulkner. The title served as a rather obscure joke: Sherwood was not a Creole and neither were most of the people featured. But with Reed's commentary, these profiles serve as an entry into the world of artists and writers that dined on Decatur Street, attended masked balls, and blatantly ignored the Prohibition Act. These men and women also helped to establish New Orleans institutions such as the Double Dealer literary magazine, the Arts and Crafts Club, and Le Petit Theatre. But unlike most bohemias, the one in New Orleans existed as a whites-only affair. Though some of the bohemians were relatively progressive, and many employed African American material in their own work, few of them knew or cared about what was going on across town among the city's black intellectuals and artists. The positive developments from this French Quarter renaissance, however, attracted attention and visitors, inspiring the historic preservation and commercial revitalization that turned the area into a tourist destination. Predictably, this gentrification drove out many of the working artists and writers who had helped revive the area. As Reed points out, one resident who identified herself as an "artist" on the 1920 federal census gave her occupation in 1930 as "saleslady, real estate," reflecting the decline of an active artistic class. A charming and insightful glimpse into an era, Dixie Bohemia describes the writers, artists, poseurs, and hangers-on in the New Orleans art scene of the 1920s and illuminates how this dazzling world faded as quickly as it began.




Creole Fires


Book Description

The Louisiana sun beat mercilessly on Nicole St. Claire just as fate, too, had been merciless. The once wealthy, flirtatious belle stood on the auction block to be sold as a servant. Her sensual figure disguised, her glorious titian hair disheveled, she looked like a waif, but she was all woman, trembling when she recognized the highest bidder—idol of her childhood dreams, the owner of plantation Belle Chene. A man of blazing passion, Alex du Villier bought the girl out of pity, but her aqua eyes stirred his soul and her body ignited his blood. She would be the perfect mistress to make him forget his coming marriage to a cold, haughty heiress. Now he intended to teach this innocent beauty that although he had purchased her freedom, he could steal her heart. An affair of burning desires. . . . Under a Creole moon their passion became a wildfire neither could control, driving them to heart-wrenching choices of silken sin . . . or freedom and love.




Bondmen and Rebels


Book Description

Originally published in 1985, and available for the first time in paperback, Bondmen & Rebels provides a pioneering study of slave resistance in the Americas. Using the large-scale Antigua slave conspiracy of 1736 as a window into that society, David Barry Gaspar explores the deeper interactive character of the relation between slave resistance and white control.




"New Negroes from Africa"


Book Description

In 1838, the British government outlawed the slave trade, emancipated all of the slaves in its possessions, and began to interdict slave ships en route to the Americas. Almost at once, colonies that had depended on slave labour were faced with a liberated and unwilling labour force. At the same time, newly freed slaves in Sierra Leone (and later from America and elsewhere) were "persuaded" to emigrate to other British colonies to provide a new workforce to replace or augment remnants of the old. Some became paid labourers, others indentured servants. These two groups - one, English-speaking colonists; the other, new African immigrants - are the focus of this study of "receptive" communities in the West Indies. Adderley describes the formation of these settlements, and, working from scant records, tries to tease out information about the families of liberated Africans, the labour they performed, their religions, and the culture they brought with them. She addresses issues of gender, ethnicity, and identity, and concludes with a discussion of repatriation.