Dark Work
Dark Work

Author: Christy Clark-Pujara

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1479855634

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.

African Kings and Black Slaves
African Kings and Black Slaves

Author: Herman L. Bennett

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-09-10

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0812295498

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process, Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler. In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved. Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves' experiences in the Americas.

Capital Culture
Capital Culture

Author: Neil Harris

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 649

ISBN-13: 022606784X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

American art museums flourished in the late twentieth century, and the impresario leading much of this growth was J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from 1969 to 1992. Along with S. Dillon Ripley, who served as Smithsonian secretary for much of this time, Brown reinvented the museum experience in ways that had important consequences for the cultural life of Washington and its visitors as well as for American museums in general. In Capital Culture, distinguished historian Neil Harris provides a wide-ranging look at Brown’s achievement and the growth of museum culture during this crucial period. Harris combines his in-depth knowledge of American history and culture with extensive archival research, and he has interviewed dozens of key players to reveal how Brown’s showmanship transformed the National Gallery. At the time of the Cold War, Washington itself was growing into a global destination, with Brown as its devoted booster. Harris describes Brown’s major role in the birth of blockbuster exhibitions, such as the King Tut show of the late 1970s and the National Gallery’s immensely successful Treasure Houses of Britain, which helped inspire similarly popular exhibitions around the country. He recounts Brown’s role in creating the award-winning East Building by architect I. M. Pei and the subsequent renovation of the West building. Harris also explores the politics of exhibition planning, describing Brown's courtship of corporate leaders, politicians, and international dignitaries. In this monumental book Harris brings to life this dynamic era and exposes the creation of Brown's impressive but costly legacy, one that changed the face of American museums forever.

Leon and the Champion Chip
Leon and the Champion Chip

Author: Allen Kurzweil

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2011-02-08

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0062033964

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Leon's back. Having survived the sweatshop methods of Miss Hagmeyer, his needle-wielding fourth grade teacher at the Classical School, Leon braces himself for fifth grade. He arrives armed with a backpack full of pens and pencils, binders and notebooks . . . plus a rag doll that's the spitting image of Henry Lumpkin, the bully who has Leon in his sights. If the doll works the way it's supposed to, Leon (and his buddies P.W. and Lily-Matisse) won't have to worry about Lumpkin the Pumpkin! Better still, Leon has a fabulous new teacher, Mr. Sparks, who conducts science experiments using that most miraculous of research materials -- the potato chip. And a good thing, too. Mr. Sparks's lab work will come in handy when Leon is forced to take on Alphonse "The Chippopotamus" Cipollini at the annual Chipapalooza! Chip-Off. Once you've sunk your teeth into Leon and the Champion Chip, the hilarious sequel to Leon and the Spitting Image, you'll never eat potato chips the same way again!

Measuring the New World
Measuring the New World

Author: Neil Safier

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0226733564

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.