Reflecting the burgeoning interest of colonial historians in South Carolina and its role as the economic and cultural center of the Lower South, Money, Trade, and Power is a comprehensive exploration of the colony's slave system, economy, and complex social and cultural life. The first six chapters of this essay collection focus on the formative decades of South Carolina's history, from 1670 through the 1730s. Contributors Meaghan N. Duff, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, and Gary L. Hewitt explore the colony's early settlement. R. C. Nash, Stephen G. Hardy, and Eirlys M. Barker investigate the rapidly...

The slave revolution that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity markets to the imagination of poets, from the council chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining...

From New Babylon to Eden traces the persecution of Huguenots in France and the eventual emigration of a small bloc of the French Calvinist population to colonial South Carolina. Once there, rather than isolate themselves as a separate religious enclave, they chose instead to integrate into the Southern strain of nascent Anglo-American society, dominated by slavery and the Church of England. Through intermarriage and adaptation to the new economic and political environment, Huguenots rapidly numbered among the most influential and successful colonists, leaving a persevering legacy throughout...

A case study in the social history of frontier town building set in the swamps of South Carolina

The presence of African influence and tradition in the Americas has long been recognized in art, music, language, agriculture, and religion. T. J. Desch Obi explores another cultural continuity that is as old as eighteenth-century slave settlements in South America and as contemporary as hip-hop culture. In this thorough survey of the history of African martial arts techniques, Obi maps the translation of numerous physical combat techniques across three continents and several centuries to illustrate how these practices evolved over time and are still recognizable in American culture today....

Manumission--the act of freeing a slave while the institution of slavery continues--has received relatively little scholarly attention as compared to other aspects of slavery and emancipation. To address this gap, editors Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks present a volume of essays that comprise the first-ever comparative study of manumission as it affected slave systems on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this landmark volume, an international group of scholars consider the history and implications of manumission from the medieval period to the late nineteenth century as the...

"Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World" traces the changing significance of a dozen saints and holy sites from the fourth century to the twentieth and from Africa, Sicily, Wales, and Iceland to Canada, Boston, Mexico, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Scholars representing the fields of history, art history, religious studies, and communications contribute their perspectives in this interdisciplinary collection, also notable as the first English language study of many of the saints treated in the volume. Several chapters chart the changing images and meanings of holy people as their...

The essays in Creating and Contesting Carolina shed new light on how the various peoples of the Carolinas responded to the tumultuous changes shaping the geographic space that the British called Carolina during the Proprietary period (1663-1719). In doing so, the essays focus attention on some of the most important and dramatic watersheds in the history of British colonization in the New World. These years brought challenging and dramatic changes to the region, such as the violent warfare between British and Native Americans, struggles between the British and the Spanish, the no-less dramatic...

Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World is a unique blend of cultural and architectural history that considers Jewish heritage as it expanded among the continents and islands linked by the Atlantic Ocean between the mid-fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Barry L. Stiefel achieves a powerful synthesis of material culture research and traditional historical research in his examination of the early modern Jewish diaspora in the New World.

Through this generously illustrated work, Stiefel examines forty-six synagogues built in Europe, South America, the Caribbean Islands, colonial...

In an attempt to counter the insular narratives of much of the sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War in the United States, editors David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis present this collection of essays to highlight the war not just as a North American conflict but as a global one affected by transnational concerns. The book, while addressing the origins of the Civil War, places the struggle over slavery and sovereignty in the U.S. in the context of other conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Additionally Gleeson and Lewis offer an analysis of the impact of the war and its results...