As If She Were Free

As If She Were Free
Author: Erica L. Ball
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2020-10-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1108493408

A groundbreaking collective biography narrating the history of emancipation through the life stories of women of African descent in the Americas.

Mosquito Empires

Mosquito Empires
Author: J. R. McNeill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2010-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139484508

This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them.

An Aqueous Territory

An Aqueous Territory
Author: Ernesto Bassi
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822373734

In An Aqueous Territory Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the transimperial Greater Caribbean between 1760 and 1860. Focusing on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (present-day Colombia), Bassi shows that the region's residents did not live their lives bounded by geopolitical borders. Rather, the cross-border activities of sailors, traders, revolutionaries, indigenous peoples, and others reflected their perceptions of the Caribbean as a transimperial space where trade, information, and people circulated, both conforming to and in defiance of imperial regulations. Bassi demonstrates that the islands, continental coasts, and open waters of the transimperial Greater Caribbean constituted a space that was simultaneously Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Danish, Anglo-American, African, and indigenous. Exploring the "lived geographies" of the region's dwellers, Bassi challenges preconceived notions of the existence of discrete imperial spheres and the inevitable emergence of independent nation-states while providing insights into how people envision their own futures and make sense of their place in the world.

Beyond Babel

Beyond Babel
Author: Larissa Brewer-GarcĂ­a
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108493009

Examines how black intermediaries in colonial Spanish America influenced written portrayals of virtuous and beautiful blackness.

The Disappearing Mestizo

The Disappearing Mestizo
Author: Joanne Rappaport
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2014-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822376857

Much of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the "racial" categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth-century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of mixed parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archives of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) to show that individuals classified as "mixed" were not members of coherent sociological groups. Rather, they slipped in and out of the mestizo category. Sometimes they were identified as mestizos, sometimes as Indians or Spaniards. In other instances, they identified themselves by attributes such as their status, the language that they spoke, or the place where they lived. The Disappearing Mestizo suggests that processes of identification in early colonial Spanish America were fluid and rooted in an epistemology entirely distinct from modern racial discourses.

From Muslim to Christian Granada

From Muslim to Christian Granada
Author: A. Katie Harris
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2007-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801885235

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Prologue. Old Bones for a New City -- 1 Granada in the Sixteenth Century -- 2 Controversy and Propaganda -- 3 Forging History: Granadino Historiography and the Sacromonte -- 4 Civic Ritual and Civic Identity -- 5 The Plomos and the Sacromonte in Granadino Piety -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.

Visible Empire

Visible Empire
Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2012-10-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226058530

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.