Completed shortly before Walter Rodney's assassination in June 1980, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 provides an original, well-informed, and perceptive contribution to the historiography of nineteenth-century Guyanese society. This comprehensive examination encompasses the history of African and Asian immigration into Guyana, the interaction of ethnic groups, the impact of British colonialism, economic and political constraints on the working class, and the social life of the masses.

Rodney argues that the social evolution of the Guyanese working people...

In January 1927 Gus Comstock, a barbershop porter in the small Minnesota town of Fergus Falls, drank eighty cups of coffee in seven hours and fifteen minutes. The New York Times reported that near the end, amid a cheering crowd, the man's -gulps were labored, but a physician examining him found him in pretty good shape.- The event was part of a marathon coffee-drinking spree set off two years earlier by news from the Commerce Department that coffee imports to the United States amounted to five hundred cups per year per person.

In Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin...

Diaries of nineteenth-century plantation managers are rare; diaries of French sugar planters are rarer still. Although such works as the diaries of Ella Gertrude Thomas and James Henry Hammond provide insight into the plantation societies of the antebellum South, virtually no contemporary source treats planter-slave relations as extensively, or presents a white planter's views on slave society in as much detail, as do the letters and diary of Pierre Dessalles.

Now Elborg Forster and Robert Forster have translated and edited the most historically and socially significant portions of...

Drawing on extensive anthropological fieldwork, Peter Wade shows how the concept of -blackness- and discrimination are deeply embedded in different social levels and contexts--from region to neighborhood, and from politics and economics to housing, marriage, music, and personal identity.

In Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar Walton Look Lai offers the first comprehensive study of Asian immigration and the indenture system in the entire British West Indies--with particular emphasis on the experiences of indentured laborers in the major receiving colonies of British Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Exploring living and working conditions as well as the makeup of immigrant communities and their cultures, Look Lai offers a -dialectical pluralist- model of Caribbean acculturation that contrasts with the more familiar -melting pot- or -pure pluralist- model.

Written by one of France's most brilliant and creative anthropologists, The African Religions of Brazil is regarded as a classic in Afro-American studies. First published in France in 1960, the book represents a singular effort to develop a theory of the interpenetrations of African, European, Christian, and non-Christian cultures in Brazil from colonial times to the present. Addressing a remarkable range of topics--from mysticism and syncretism to the problems of collective memory, from the history of slavery in Brazil to world-wide race relations--the work is shaped by the...