Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | Rutgers · Department of History

Unlike some catchy and overreaching academic book titles, the title of this book explains its contents and approach fairly well. It quickly engages the reader in an unusual journey, discussing Africans as transatlantic sea voyagers beyond the traditional narrative of enslaved Africans sailing west to work on slave plantations in the Americas. Free...

This extremely important and informative book should put to rest any conceivable effort to minimize the brutally destructive impact of the Atlantic slave trade upon Africa and Africans or to blame the victims. West Central Africa was the only region that suffered from European occupation since the early stages of the maritime slave trade. Portugal...

The survival of African ethnic identities through four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New Wor...

ROWELL: Apart from the music, the cuisine, and Mardi Gras, what makes New Orleans different from other cities in Louisiana and cities in the United States? HALL: When I gave my first lecture in New Orleans in 1989, I said that New Orleans is the most African city in the United States. That phrase has been repeated endlessly. I think that's the firs...

This extensively researched book draws ambitious conclusions about the sugar industry and slavery in pre-bellum Louisiana. It relies heavily on traditional historical sources—correspondence and plantation records left by large planters, travelers' accounts, newspapers, slave narratives, and extensive secondary sources about slave systems in other p...

This chapter attempts to make Africans, who played a crucial role in the formation of new cultures throughout the Americas, more visible. It discusses several studies of African diaspora in the Americas. Such studies can provide a better understanding of when particular African ethnicities started to become victims of the Atlantic slave trade, and...

Although Africa is a huge continent with many different peoples, only some of them were involved in the Atlantic slave trade. During the first two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, few enslaved Africans were collected east of Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea all the way to the Slave Coast. This chapter seeks evidence of the clustering of Africa...

The goal of this book is to restore the severed links among Africans in Africa and their descendants in the Americas, and to prove the presence and influence of a particular ethnicity in the Americas. Specifically, it challenges the widely held belief among historians that African ethnicities had little demographic and cultural influence on the Ame...

Slave trade and slavery have existed throughout the world for millennia. As the Atlantic slave trade began, slavery became associated with blacks, and antiblack racism became very powerful in Europe and the Americas. This chapter discusses the development of the Atlantic slave trade and its devastating impact on Africa. In particular, it looks at h...

The earliest Atlantic slave trade began in the Greater Senegambia. This region was an important source of African slaves, who were shipped to the Americas for the rest of the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that people from the Greater Senegambia have made rich demographic and cultural contributions to many regions in the Americas, especial...

This chapter discusses the transatlantic slave trade from the Bantulands–West Central Africa, the region that supplied enslaved Africans to the Americas in massive numbers throughout the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade, and Mozambique, a region that exported enslaved Africans in a large scale during the late eighteenth and the ninete...

The Lower Guinea coasts named by maritime traders as the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast on the Bight of Benin were major sources of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas. This chapter discusses the transatlantic slave trade voyages from these regions of the Lower Guinea across the Atlantic. It demonstrates how using databases...

The Atlantic slave trade from the Bight of Biafra rose rapidly during the eighteenth century and continued well into the nineteenth century, bringing a significant number of slaves to Cuba. This chapter explores when and what proportions of African ethnicities were shipped out of the Bight of Biafra. Since some ethnicities were shipped from more th...

O artigo demonstra a aplicabilidade de novas metodologias, especialmente a utilização de cálculos efetuados a partir da montagem de bancos de dados relacionais constituídos a partir de documentos variados, gerados na América e no âmbito do comércio negreiro através do Atlântico. Tais documentos são fundamentais para a identificação das etnias dos a...

Ethnohistory 48.4 (2001) 758-760 Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community. By Edmund T. Gordon. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. xiv + 330 pp., preface, introduction, map, acronyms, references, index.) This important, interesting book studies contradictory and ever-shifting identities among a people of...

Journal of Social History 34.2 (2000) 478-479 When we open any book published by B. W. Higman, we can expect a thoroughly researched, well conceived, and clearly written work. This book is no exception. It is a case study of one of the largest, most populated, and best documented estates in Jamaica, discussing its creation and development over an e...

Louisiana was, and is, a truly, multicutural society that developed very differently from the thirteen original Angolo colonies. In colonial Louisiana, an entirely new Creole culture was created from the knowledge, skills, folk art, and world views of Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans. This chapter explains that it was women-especially moth...

This is a book review of Aline Helg, Our Rightful share.

Refutes the benevolence of Spanish slave law as purported by historians who relied on Frank Tannenbaum's "Slave and Citizen for the foundation of their conclusions; leniency toward slaves is held to have not been practiced, and to have been prescribed as a measure to undermine slave rebellions. (KG)

Hall "We are called, we are named just like a child is given a name and who, like a child, do not have a say in the choice of our own name." (Possuímos um nome, recebemos um nome como qualquer criança, e, como crianças, não temos o direito de opinar na escolha do nosso próprio nome.) – Olabiyi Yai. 1 "Qui se disent leur nation Bambara" (Eles dizem...