All for Liberty

Jeff Strickland tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped thirty-six fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. While Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey remain the most recognizable rebels, the pivotal role of Nicholas Kelly is often forgotten. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas's story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.

Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution was perhaps the most successful slave rebellion in modern history; it created the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas. This book tells the story of how enslaved Africans forcibly brought to colonial Haiti through the trans-Atlantic slave trade used their cultural and religious heritages, social networks, and labor and militaristic skills to survive horrific conditions. They built webs of networks between African and 'creole' runaways, slaves, and a small number of free people of color through rituals and marronnage - key aspects to building the racial solidarity that helped make the revolution successful. Analyzing underexplored archival sources and advertisements for fugitives from slavery, Crystal Eddins finds indications of collective consciousness and solidarity, unearthing patterns of resistance. Considering the importance of the Haitian Revolution and the growing scholarly interest in exploring it, Eddins fills an important gap in the existing literature.

Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment

Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range of strategies used in other artworks depicting slave resistance, including: elisions, caesura, lacuna, off-screen action, obfuscation, abstraction, redaction, and more. These devices safeguard history from appropriation or commodification on the one hand; and on the other, highlight the way slave resistance is neglected in the historical record and commemorative landscape.

“Hearing Nat Turner”: Within the 1831 Slave Rebellion

In this chef d’oeuvre, Tomlins offers a heuristic for how to extract the words, ideas, and actions of Nat Turner, the Black, enslaved man who led the most important slave rebellion in American history. Tomlins makes such an effort from within a cluster of different kinds of sources, each one a small window on the past, none of which Turner personally wrote. How to see beyond these particularly distorted glass windows on the past is not obvious. Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner provides a key not only to Turner, and to his powerful sense of how to fracture the fragile legitimacy of the southern slaveholding elite, but also a metaphysics of interpretive strategy that can serve as a theoretical model.

The problem of the abolition of slavery and maritime rights on U.S. vessels with regards to British American relations in the first half of the 19th century

The article analyses the struggle of Anglo-American relations connected to slaves and maritime rights on the sea from 1831 to 1842. The study is based on monographs, reports, treaties and correspondences between the two countries from the explosion of the Comet case in 1831 to the signing of the Webster–Ashburton treaty in 1842. This study focuses on three fundamental issues: the appearance of Comet, Encomium, Enterprise, Hermosa and Creole as international incidents with regards to British-American relations; the view of both countries on the abolition of slavery, maritime rights as well as the dispute over issues to resolve arising from these incidents; the results of British-American diplomacy to release slaves and maritime rights after the signing of the Webster–Ashburton treaty. The study found that the American slave ships were special cases in comparison with the previous controversies in bilateral relations. The American slave vessels sailed to the British colonies due to bad weather conditions and a slave rebellion on board. In fact, Great Britain and the United States had never dealt with a similar case, so both sides failed to find a unified view regarding the differences in the laws and policies of the two countries on slavery. The history of British-American relations demonstrated that under the pressures of the border dispute in Maine and New Brunswick, the affairs were not resolved. In addition, it could have had more of an impact on the relationship between the two countries, eventually p the two countries into a war. In that situation, the diplomatic and economic solutions given to the abolition of slavery and maritime rights were only temporary. However, the international affairs related to the American slave vessels paved the way for the settlement of maritime rights for British-American relations in the second half of 19th century.

The depreciation of haitian creole and haitian code switching

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of Haitian code-switching, as a diglossic country, and Haitian Creole depreciation. as the native language of Haiti. The history of the Haitian Creole language developed by enslaved west African, in the plantation of the Island during the slave rebellion for the revolution, after several attempts conspiring for their freedom. After the disembarkation of the French Colony, in the Island where they settled from 1659 until 1804, French has become the language of dominance. It was the language of the masters´ plantations. These two languages have remained the official languages of Haiti, where Haitian people Code-switch when using either French or Haitian Creole. However, Creole has become the language of depreciation, or using another term for it, a marginalized language. In this study a qualitative and descriptive analysis have been carried out, through social media,such as: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and You-Tube, which were used to collect data on Haitian code-switching, by means of the observation of one of the Haitian Ex-presidents, Mr. Joseph Michel Martelly, who is also a famous singer. Some video links will be provided to observe the president Michel Martelly´s code-switching, in different situations, such as: the debate with his opponent Mme Mirlande Hyppolite Manigat, in 2011, before he won the election; interviews with national and international journalists about political and artistic movement; and his performance on stage as a singer.