You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.
Rice is a first step toward a history of rice and its place in capitalism from global and comparative perspectives.
The ancient rice-growing cultures of West Africa and their transplantation to the Georgia-Carolina coast
COMBEE is based upon original research and offers the first full account of Tubman's Civil War service and the Combahee River Raid. In the process, it also offers the story of enslaved families living in bondage and fighting for their freedom, and does so using their own distinct and individual voices.
Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world. Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europ...
Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalien...
"An eloquent and essential correction to contemporary discussions of the American working class."—The Nation From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing, and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his engrossing history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr., refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contribution...
Daniel Littlefield's investigation of colonial South Carolinianss preference for some African ethnic groups over others as slaves reveals how the Africans' diversity and capabilities inhibited the development of racial stereotypes and influenced their masters' perceptions of slaves. It also highlights how South Carolina, perhaps more than anywhere else in North America, exemplifies the common effort of Africans and Europeans in molding American civilization.
An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America. In the tradition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me comes Clifford Thompson's What It Is. Thompson was raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, and he decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else's. As a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, Thompson finds himself questioning his most deeply held convictions ...