Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World


Book Description

Zephaniah Kingsley is best known for his Fort George Island plantation in Duval County, Florida, now a National Park Service site, and for his 1828 pamphlet, A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society, that advocated just and human treatment of slaves, liberal emancipation policies, and granting rights to free persons of color. Paradoxically, his fortune came from the purchase, sale, and labor of enslaved Africans. In this penetrating biography, Daniel Schafer vividly chronicles Kingsley's evolving thoughts on race and slavery, exploring his business practices and his private life. Kingsley fathered children by several enslaved women, then freed and lived with them in a unique mixed-race family. One of the women--the only one he acknowledged as his "wife" though they were never formally married--was Anta Madgigine Ndiaye (Anna Kingsley), a member of the Senegalese royal family, who was captured in a slave raid and purchased by Kingsley in Havana, Cuba. A ship captain, Caribbean merchant, and Atlantic slave trader during the perilous years of international warfare following the French Revolution, Kingsley sought protection under neutral flags, changing allegiance from Britain to the United States, Denmark, and Spain. Later, when the American acquisition of Florida brought rigid race and slavery policies that endangered the freedom of Kingsley's mixed-race family, he responded by moving his "wives" and children to a settlement in Haiti he established for free persons of color. Kingsley's assertion that color should not be a "badge of degradation" made him unusual in the early Republic; his unique life is revealed in this fascinating reminder of the deep connections between Europe, the Caribbean, and the young United States.




Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World


Book Description

This biography tells the story of Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., a controversial figure who owned a Florida plantation in the early American Republic




Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley


Book Description

Florida Historical Society Charlton Tebeau Award In this revised and expanded edition of Anna Kingsley’s remarkable life story, Daniel Schafer draws on new discoveries to prove true the longstanding rumors that Anna Madgigine Jai was originally a princess from the royal family of Jolof in Senegal. Captured from her homeland in 1806, she became first an American slave, later a slaveowner, and eventually a central figure in a free black community. Anna Kingsley’s story adds a dramatic chapter to the history of the South, the state of Florida, and the African diaspora.




Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World


Book Description

Traces and Memories deals with the foundation, mechanisms and scope of slavery-related memorial processes, interrogating how descendants of enslaved populations reconstruct the history of their ancestors when transatlantic slavery is one of the variables of the memorial process. While memory studies mark a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, the book seeks to bridge the memorial representations of historical events with the production and knowledge of those events. The book offers a methodological and epistemological reflection on the challenges that are raised by archival limitations in relation to slavery and how they can be overcome. It covers topics such as the historical and memorial legacy/ies of slavery, the memorialization of slavery, the canonization and patrimonialization of the memory of slavery, the places and conditions of the production of knowledge on slavery and its circulation, the heritage of slavery and the (re)construction of (collective) identity. By offering fresh perspectives on how slavery-related sites of memory have been retrospectively (re)framed or (re)shaped, the book probes the constraints which determine the inscription of this contentious memory in the public sphere. The volume will serve as a valuable resource in the area of slavery, memory, and Atlantic studies.




The TransAtlantic reconsidered


Book Description

Is the Atlantic World in a state of crisis? At a time when many political observers perceive indeed a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks in Transatlantic Relations and Atlantic History alike become crucial. This volume provides an academic foundation to critically assess the Atlantic World and to rethink transatlantic relations in a transnational and global perspective. The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together leading experts such as Harvard historians Charles S. Maier and Bernard Bailyn and former ERC scientific board member Nicholas Canny. All the scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges.




Entangled Empires


Book Description

The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic as a hemispheric system? : English merchants navigating the Iberian Atlantic / Mark Sheaves -- Agents of empire : Africans and the origins of English colonialism in the Americas / Michael Guasco -- Empires on drugs : pharmaceutical go-betweens and the Anglo-Portuguese alliance / Benjamin Breen -- Marrying utopia : Mary and Philip, Richard Eden, and the English alchemy of Spanish Peru / Christopher Heaney -- The pegs of a wider frame : Jewish merchants in Anglo-Iberian trade / Holly Snyder -- Entangled Irishman : George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalry / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara -- Planters and powerbrokers : George J.F. Clarke, Interracial Love, and allegiance in the revolutionary circum-Caribbean / Cameron B. Strang -- The "Iberian" justifications of territorial possession by pilgrims and Puritans in the colonization of America / Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra -- "As the Spaniards have always done" : the legacy of Florida's missions for Carolina Indian relations and the origins of the Yamasee War / Bradley Dixon -- Reluctant petitioners : English officials and the Spanish Caribbean / April Hatfield -- Enabling, implementing, experiencing entanglement : empires, sailors, and coastal peoples in the British-Spanish Caribbean / Ernesto Bassi -- The Seven Years' War and the globalization of Anglo-Iberian imperial entanglement : the view from Manila / Kristie Flannery




This Day in Florida History


Book Description

On January 22, 1912, Henry Flagler rode on the first passenger train from South Florida to Key West. On April 2, 1513, Juan Ponce de León claimed Florida for Spain. On December 6, 1947, Everglades National Park held its opening ceremony. Featuring one entry per day of the year, this book is a fun and enlightening collection of moments from Florida history. Good and bad, famous and little-known, historical and contemporary, these events reveal the depth and complexity of the state’s past. They cover everything from revolts by Apalachee Indians to crashes at the Daytona 500, the establishment of Fort Mosé, and the recurrence of hurricanes. They involve cultural leaders like Stetson Kennedy and Zora Neale Hurston, iconic institutions like Disney and NASA, and important eras like Prohibition and the civil rights movement. Each entry includes a short description and is paired with a suggested reading for learning more about the event or topic of the day. This Day in Florida History is the perfect starting point for discovering the diversity of stories and themes that make up the Sunshine State.




Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions


Book Description

In Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions, a preeminent historian of Africa argues that scholars of the Americas and the Atlantic world have not given Africa its due consideration as part of either the Atlantic world or the age of revolutions. The book examines the jihād movement in the context of the age of revolutions—commonly associated with the American and French revolutions and the erosion of European imperialist powers—and shows how West Africa, too, experienced a period of profound political change in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Paul E. Lovejoy argues that West Africa was a vital actor in the Atlantic world and has wrongly been excluded from analyses of the period. Among its chief contributions, the book reconceptualizes slavery. Lovejoy shows that during the decades in question, slavery expanded extensively not only in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil but also in the jihād states of West Africa. In particular, this expansion occurred in the Muslim states of the Sokoto Caliphate, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro. At the same time, he offers new information on the role antislavery activity in West Africa played in the Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora. Finally, Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions provides unprecedented context for the political and cultural role of Islam in Africa—and of the concept of jihād in particular—from the eighteenth century into the present. Understanding that there is a long tradition of jihād in West Africa, Lovejoy argues, helps correct the current distortion in understanding the contemporary jihād movement in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.




A Southern Underground Railroad


Book Description

Despite its apparent isolation as an older region of the country, the Southeast provided a vital connecting link between the Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years of the antebellum period. From the beginning of the revolutionary war to the eve of the First Seminole War in 1817, hundreds and eventually several thousand Africans and African Americans in Georgia, and to a lesser extent South Carolina, crossed the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast. Even in times of peace, there remained a steady flow of individuals moving south and southwest, reflecting the aspirations of a captive people. A Southern Underground Railroad constitutes a powerful counter-narrative in American history, a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States. It is a potent reminder of the strength of Black resistance in the post-revolutionary South and the ability of this community to influence the balance of power in a contested region. Paul M. Pressly’s research shows that their movement across borders was an integral part of the sustained struggle for dominance in the Southeast not only among the Great Powers but also among the many different racial, ethnic, and religious groups that inhabited the region and contended for control.




Africans in the Old South


Book Description

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of a range of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores. The subjects of Africans in the Old South include Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations and slaves, passed as white, and integrated herself into the Lowcountry planter elite; Robert Johnson, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia, who later learned English, won his freedom, and joined the abolition movement in the North; Dimmock Charlton, who bought his freedom after being illegally enslaved in Savannah; and a group of unidentified Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, escaped in Mobile’s port, and were recaptured and eventually returned to their homeland. These exceptional lives challenge long-held assumptions about how the slave trade operated and who was involved. The African Atlantic was a complex world characterized by constant movement, intricate hierarchies, and shifting identities. Not all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were enslaved, nor was the voyage always one-way.