FORUM ON KATHARINE GERBNER'S CHRISTIAN SLAVERY: CONVERSION AND RACE IN THE PROTESTANT ATLANTIC WORLD

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-753
Author(s):  
Jon Sensbach

Between roughly 1500 and nearly the end of the nineteenth century, slave traders sent more than twelve million enslaved Africans to the Americas. It is no secret that Christianity was deeply complicit with the rise of the plantation system that created the lethally voracious demand for forced labor. Two basic questions have preoccupied historians studying the links between religion and slavery: why did Christianity become an ideological bulwark for human bondage; and why did enslaved Africans and their descendants begin to embrace a religion so friendly to slavery, inverting it into a spiritual vernacular of liberation and transcendence? Whereas historians of Atlantic world Protestantism have mostly probed these questions in their North American contexts, Katherine Gerbner's book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, shifts the focus to the Caribbean of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Protestant missionaries there began proselytizing among enslaved Africans at least half a century earlier than in North America, creating connections between race, religion, and slavery that would prove perniciously durable across both time and region. In this forum, four distinguished scholars consider the implications of Gerbner's work.

Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.


2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward L. Smither

The aim of the current article is to show that an important element behind the establishment of evangelical missions to Brazil � particularly during the pioneering stages � was evangelical revival, especially that which occurred in North America during the nineteenth century. Following a brief introduction to the general relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth century revivals and evangelical missions, I shall endeavour to support historically the commonly accepted, yet often unsubstantiated, correlation between such movements of revival and mission. Firstly, I will show the significant paradigm shift in missional thinking, which took place in the nineteenth century, as North American evangelicals began to regard Roman Catholic countries in Latin America as mission fields. Secondly, I shall argue that the influence of nineteenth-century revivalist evangelicalism (particularly that sourced in North America) on missions to Brazil and Latin America can best be observed in the Brazilian evangelical identity that emerged in the twentieth century, which has, in turn, propelled the Brazilian evangelical church into its own significant involvement in global missions (Noll 2009:10).


Author(s):  
Carla Gardina Pestana

Religion shaped the early modern Atlantic world in many ways. Although Iberian expansion began before the Protestant Reformation, Europe soon divided between Protestant and Catholic, and this division created a context for European understandings of the purpose of expansion. With permission from the pope to evangelize outside the Old World, the Spanish and the Portuguese split the extra-European world between them; Spain was responsible for most of the Americas (excluding only the area that would become Brazil), while Portugal took Brazil and Africa (as well as Asia). Soon representatives of each kingdom were at work, conquering, colonizing, and evangelizing. Protestantism, although it arrived late in the contest for colonies and trade in this New World, was central to Spanish understanding of its work; evangelizing the native peoples of the Americas would add additional souls to the church, making up for those who had been lost to the Protestant Reformation. When Protestants finally became involved in colonizing the Americas and trading with Africa, they similarly understood their role as combating the reach and influence of their Catholic rivals. If in 1600 the European presence outside of Europe was overwhelmingly Catholic, by 1700 a map of the spread of Christianity showed varied results. Spain controlled the central area of the Americas, including much of South America and the Caribbean, all of Central America, and all the southern area of North America (from Florida and New Mexico south). Portugal had Brazil, while Catholic France held Quebec to the north and selected islands in the Caribbean. The Protestant presence was predominantly British, and included eastern North America between Quebec and Florida as well as some islands in the Caribbean. The Protestant Dutch also held island colonies and a South American outpost. West Africa and West Central Africa hosted trading forts controlled by most of these European powers, from which were shipped slaves as well as trade goods. The religious rivalries of early modern Europe had been effectively exported. Every faith represented along the shores of the Atlantic prior to contact would participate in the intermixing that occurred afterward. The history of religion in the Atlantic world therefore explores the variety of traditions within that world and the effects of the circulation, transplantation, and encounter of these various faiths.


Author(s):  
Frank Towers

Today’s political map of North America took its basic shape in a continental crisis in the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This volume explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the mid-nineteenth century from a continental perspective that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach. This introduction orients readers by first exploring the meaning of key terms—in particular sovereignty and its historical attachment to the concept of the nation state—and then previewing how contributors interrogate different themes of the mid-century struggles that remade the continent’s political order. Those themes fall into three main categories: the character of the states made and remade in the mid-1800s; the question of sovereignty for indigenous polities that confronted the European-settler descended governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States; and the interaction between capitalist expansion and North American politics, and the concomitant implications of state making for sovereignty’s more diffuse meaning at the level of individual and group autonomy.


Author(s):  
William O'Reilly

The movement of people in the Atlantic world in the period 1450–1850 is a story of categorisation, organisation, and exploitation of labour in a time of global transformation. More than 25 million people were transported from east to west, to be planted in South, Central and North America, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands, and the West African littoral. The fruits of this seed labour came irrevocably to transform the demographic composition of the Americas and Africa, and to a lesser extent Europe. Some migrants were slaves, or unfree white colonists, notably convicts and prisoners, or indentured servants whose liberties were severely limited. Religion and language, as well as flora and fauna, travelled with the first colonists; one accident of Spanish and general European colonialism was the environmental and ecological transformation of the Americas. This article also looks at migration in the Atlantic world in relation to Africans, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and France.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Laurie K. Bertram

This article explores the history of vínarterta, a striped fruit torte imported by Icelandic immigrants to North America in the late nineteenth century and obsessively preserved by their descendants today. When roughly 20–25 percent of the population of Iceland relocated to North America between 1870 and 1914, they brought with them a host of culinary traditions, the most popular and enduring of which is this labor-intensive, spiced, layered dessert. Considered an essential fixture at any important gathering, including weddings, holidays, and funerals, vínarterta looms large in Icelandic–North American popular culture. Family recipes are often closely guarded, and any alterations to the “correct recipe,” including number of layers, inclusion or exclusion of cardamom or frosting, and the use of almond extract, are still hotly debated by community members who see changes to “original” recipes as a controversial, even offensive sign of cultural degeneration. In spite of this dedication to authenticity, this torte is an unusual ethnic symbol with a complex past. The first recipes for “Vienna torte” were Danish imports via Austria, originally popular with the Icelandic immigrant generation in the late nineteenth century because of their glamorous connections to continental Europe. Moreover, the dessert fell out of fashion in Iceland roughly at the same time as it ascended as an ethnic symbol in wartime and postwar North American heritage spectacles. Proceeding from recipe books, oral history interviews, memoirs, and Icelandic and English language newspapers, this article examines the complex history of this particular dessert.


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Angelis

Abstract This article traces the origins of applied linguistics within North America. The primary sources of information were responses from a survey of leading applied linguists conducted in 1999 and a review of records from professional associations, chiefly those associated with the Linguistic Society of America, back to its foundation in 1924. Evidence is reported of the recognition of applied linguistics even with that designation as early as 1925. Extensive work is cited of an applied nature for three decades after that, much of it not carrying any such label. Likewise, language related activity conducted by many known more as specialists in other fields is reported from throughout the nineteenth century. A chronological record of North American applied linguistics is proposed showing four phases. The first predates the foundation of the Linguistic Society of America (prior to 1924). The second, labeled the post LSA period, covers the years from 1925 through 1959. The third, the early applied era, extends from 1960 to 1990 and the fourth, the independent status period extends from 1990 to the present. Summary comments portray the character of applied linguistics in North America in relation to similar activities in other geographical areas.


Author(s):  
Craig Muldrew

There would have been no Atlantic world without trade. Throughout this period, the consumption of American-produced sugar, tobacco, and coffee, as well as the use of American gold and silver for money, was common throughout Europe. At the same time, the settlement of colonial emigrants and transported slave populations continued to grow and to transform the agriculture and environment of the Americas and western Africa. By the mid-eighteenth century the characteristic trading patterns of the Atlantic world were well established. The main exports at the beginning of the period from the New World were gold and silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru, as well as sugar and tobacco grown in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, together with furs and cod from Canada and forest products from New England. We should not forget that people were also traded; European traders purchased an ever-increasing number of slaves in Africa for export to the Americas. Britain emerged as the dominant trading, military, and investment force by the nineteenth century.


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