Gelien Matthews

In this illuminating study, Gelien Matthews demonstrates how slave rebellions in the British West Indies influenced the tactics of abolitionists in England. Moving between the world of the British Parliament and the realm of Caribbean plantations, Matthews reveals a transatlantic dialectic of antislavery agitation and slave insurrection that eventually influenced the dismantling of slavery in British-held territories.

Focusing on slave revolts that took place in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831–32, Matthews identifies four key aspects in British abolitionist propaganda regarding Caribbean slavery: the denial that antislavery activism prompted slave revolts, the attempt to understand and recount slave uprisings from the slaves’ perspectives, the portrayal of slave rebels as victims of armed suppressors and as agents of the antislavery movement, and the presentation of revolts as a rationale against the continuance of slavery. She makes shrewd use of previously overlooked publications of British abolitionists to prove that their language changed over time in response to slave uprisings.

Unlike previous historians, Matthews emphasizes the agency of slaves in the march toward freedom. Her compelling work is a valuable analytical tool in the interpretation of abolition, uncovering the important connections between rebellious slaves on one side of the Atlantic and abolitionists on the other side.

Gelien Matthews teaches history at Caribbean Nazarene College in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

Jeffrey E. Anderson

From black sorcerers’ client-based practices in the antebellum South to the postmodern revival of hoodoo and its tandem spiritual supply stores, the supernatural has been a key component of the African American experience. Jeffrey E. Anderson unfolds a fascinating story as he traces the origins and evolution of conjuring practices across the centuries. What began as a mixture of African, European, and Native American influences within slave communities finds expression today in a multi-million-dollar business.

Though some may see the study of conjure as a perpetuation of old stereotypes that depict blacks as bound to superstition, the truth, Anderson notes, is far more complex. Drawing on folklore, fiction and nonfiction, music, art, and oral interviews, he explores various portrayals of the conjurer—backward buffoon, rebel against authority, and symbol of racial pride. He also examines the actual work performed by conjurers, including the use of pharmacologically active herbs to treat illness, psychology to ease mental ailments, fear to bring about the death of enemies and acquittals at trials, and advice to encourage clients to succeed on their own.

Conjure’s ability to merge supernaturalism and religion—along with a widespread belief in, fear of, or respect for conjure’s effectiveness—has made it a force across generations, Anderson shows, and not only among blacks. New Age spiritualism, Afro-Caribbean syncretic faiths, and modern psychological understandings of magic have all contributed to a recent revival of conjure.

By critically examining the many influences that have shaped conjure over time, Anderson effectively redefines magic as a cultural power, one that has profoundly touched the arts, black Christianity, and American society overall.

Praise for the Book

“The people who invented conjure to survive centuries of brutal slavery and repression have much to teach us. This exquisitely researched book calls the logic and necessity of conjure, hoodoo, voodoo, and magic into the light of our collective histories. It is essential reading for all students of the black experience in America, essential for all who wish to understand what these powerful and practical spiritualities still offer the world.”—Martha Ward, author of Voodoo Queen, The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau

“Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Conjure in African American Society sensitively explores hoodoo's sources in Africa, its creolization on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave plantations, its urban permutations in the twentieth century, and its significance at the dawn of the twenty-first.”—Charles Joyner, author of Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folklore

Edited by Bradley G. Bond

French colonial Louisiana has failed to occupy a place in the historic consciousness of the United States, perhaps owing to its short duration (1699-1762) and its standing outside the dominant narrative of the British colonies in North America. This anthology seeks to locate early Louisiana in its proper place, bringing together a broad range of scholarship that depicts a complex and vibrant sphere.

Colonial Louisiana comprised the vast center of what would become the United States. It lay between Spanish, British, and French colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and between woodland and eastern plains Indians. As such, it provided a meeting place for Europeans, African, and native Americans, functioning as a crossroads between the New World and other worlds. While acknowledging colonial Louisiana's peripheral position in U.S. and Atlantic World history, this volume demonstrates that the colony stands at the thematic center of the shared narratives and historiographies of diverse places. Through its twelve essays, French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World tells a whole story, the story of a place that belongs to the historic narrative of the Atlantic World.

Bradley G. Bond is the author of Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South: Mississippi, 1830-1900 and the editor of Mississippi: A Documentary History. He is a professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

April 2005
360 pages, 6 x 9
6 halftones
ISBN 0-8071-3035-4 cloth $59.95s

Peter Kolchin

One reason that the South attracts so much interest is that its history inevitably involves big questions — continuity versus change, slavery and freedom, the meaning of “race,” the formation of national identity. Because these issues are central to human experience, southern history properly conceived is of more than regional interest. In A Sphinx on the American Land, Peter Kolchin explores three comparative frameworks for the study of the nineteenth-century South in an effort to nudge the subject away from provincialism and toward the kind of global concerns that are already transforming it into one of the most innovative fields of historical research.

The volume opens with a comparison between the South and the North, or what Kolchin terms the “un-South.” Turning to the cohesion and variations among what he calls the “many Souths,” Kolchin reminds us that there has never been one South or archetypal southerner. Finally, he explores parallels between the South and regions outside the United States — the “other Souths” — Russia most notably.

Kolchin examines how scholars have approached each of his comparative frameworks and how they might do so in the future, making his book at once a work of history and of historiography. Illustrating the ways in which southern history is also American history and world history, this elegant, profound volume proves Kolchin to be one of the stellar southern historians of his generation.