Seen through the lens of what today we call the “Black Atlantic,” the arrival of this tiny band of Africans at Jamestown in 1619 symbolizes a complex process that drew every major European power, scores of colonial settlements, and hundreds of ethnic groups on three continents into an economic vortex that enriched both Europeans and … Continued
By 1570, historian James Sweet says that in Mexico, black Africans actually outnumbered people born in Europe by 3 to 1, including 20,569 Africans and 6,644 Spaniards; 11,067 criollos (persons of pure Spanish descent born in Spanish America); 2,435 mulattos (of mixed black and white ancestry); and another 2,437 mestizos (of mixed European and Native … Continued
The great slave-trade historian David Eltis estimates that at least 352,800 slaves had been shipped to the New World by 1625.5
The significance of the Mum Bett case and the other freedom suits of the 1780s lay more in how they reflected public attitudes in the post-Revolutionary period, rather than in how they shaped opinion or the law. While the various freedom suits did not legally end slavery in the commonwealth, they certainly indicated how juries … Continued
Dessalines led his countrymen in the creation of the world’s first black republic, renamed the nation of Haiti, officially born on January 1, 1804. It had been the largest and most successful slave revolt in history.
It’s more that we need to infer the right conclusions and insights from the range of experiences we already have.
Often when we are suffering, some emptiness view or other is quite capable of dissolving or substantially reducing that suffering. Sometimes just dissolving it thus is fine. Sometimes though, that suffering may be felt to be an integral part of one’s humanity, so that it might seem necessary to allow and to feel that particular … Continued