Kategoria BISAC: History >> Caribbean & West Indies - General

At one gilded moment in history, his fame was so great that he was known the world over by his nickname alone: Rubi. Pop songs were written about him. Women whom he had never met offered to leave their husbands for him. He had an eye for feminine beauty, particularly when it came with great wealth: Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke, Eva Peron, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. But he was a man's man as well, polo player and race-car driver, chumming around with the likes of Joe Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Oleg Cassini, Aly Khan, and King Farouk. He was also a jewel thief, and an intimate of one of the world's most...

In this eye-opening study, Sidney Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar, and reveals how closely interwoven are sugar's origins as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies with is use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet...

Calypso music is an integral part of Trinidad s national identity. When, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the great Trinidadian musician Roaring Lion where he was from, Lion famously replied the land of calypso. But in a nation as diverse as Trinidad, why is it that calypso has emerged as the emblematic music?
In" Governing Sound, " Jocelyne Guilbault examines the conditions that have enabled calypso to be valorized, contested, and targeted as a field of cultural politics in Trinidad. The prominence of calypso, Guilbault argues, is uniquely enmeshed in projects of governing...

"These four volumes in this major series... provide a single-source reference to the status of the field of women's history and to ways that the field can be expanded.... A basic set for all academic libraries." --Library Journal Academic Newswire

Examining the role of women and gender ideology during the pre-contact and colonial periods in Latin America, Navarro looks at early indigenous societies as well as the Spanish and the Portuguese who claimed the "New World." Sanchez Korrol considers the shifts in women's roles between the 1880s and 1930s and accompanying societal...

Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635 1848

Bernard Moitt

Examines the reaction of black women to slavery.

In Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635 1848, Bernard Moitt argues that gender had a profound effect on the slave plantation system in the French Antilles. He details and analyzes the social condition of enslaved black women in the plantation societies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), and French Guiana from 1635 to the abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire in 1848. Moitt examines the lives of black women in...

"Of the hundreds of logbooks and journals I have examined, this is the most valuable for the slave trade in western Africa.... Mouser's] exhaustive background research and editing are exemplary." --George Brooks

Captain Samuel Gamble's log contains the record of a slaving venture to Africa and Jamaica that nearly failed. It is one of the best firsthand narratives of the slave trade to survive. Bruce Mouser's faithfully transcribed and carefully annotated edition of Gamble's log provides a haunting perspective on slave trading at the end of the 18th century. Gamble was captain of the...

Longing for their lost homeland unites Cuban exiles and their children, many of whom have never seen the Island. Yet as decades pass and the hope of "next year in Cuba" fades, the Cuban American community has had to forge new understandings of where "home" is and what it means to be "Cuban," "American," and/or "Cuban American." The testimonies gathered in this book offer over one hundred perspectives on the Cuban diaspora and on what it means to be Cuban in exile. Through narratives, interviews, creative writings, letters, journal entries, recipes, photographs, and paintings, Cubans from...

While much has been written about the antebellum African American interest in emigration to Africa, the equally significant interest in Haitian emigration has been largely overlooked. Although free blacks spurned attempts by the American Colonization Society to return them to Africa, during the 1820s, and again during the 1850s and early 1860s, as conditions for African Americans became ever more precarious, thousands of blacks left the U.S. for Haiti searching for civic freedom and economic opportunity in the world's first independent black republic. Such prospects caught the attention of...

During the thirteen days in October 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes each of the participants during the sometimes hour-to-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. In a new foreword, the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., discusses the book's enduring importance and the significance...

The commanders of the invasion forces break their silence to reveal the whole truth about

The CIA

• Secret plans to countermand White House decisions
• Fatally poor intelligence
• Superb dedication and training but inadequate planning and execution

The Joint Chiefs of Staff

• Approval of a suicidal battle plan, disastrous in detail

The Invasion of Cuba

• An operation that was a combination of individual and unit heroism, of hardship, betrayal, and SNAFU.