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Originally published as a collection in 2006, this volume discusses the development of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century, looking at issues such as how African societies reacted to the trade; the economic origins of black slavery in the British West Indies; and the growth of plantations responding to changes in European diet – particularly the rise of the sugar economy. The volume also has an introduction by the editor commenting on the contribution each essay makes.
Some innovators are luminous shooting stars--think Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Sylvia Plath, Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs--who make bold leaps early and suddenly, then lose their creativity. Others are late bloomers--Paul Cezanne, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Hitchcock, Warren Buffett--who show little early promise, but spend long periods doggedly pursing distant goals, and attain greatness in old age. By analyzing the careers of scores of great innovators, this book reveals systematic differences in the motivations and methods of these two types, and their very different patterns of creativity over the life cycle. The result is a new and deeper unified understanding of the sources of human creativity.
This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought-successfully-to feed upon this commerce and-with markedly less success-to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.
At what stage of their careers do great artists produce their most important work? In a series of studies that bring new insights and new dimensions to the study of artistic creativity, Galenson’s new book examines the careers of more than one hundred modern painters, poets and novelists to reveal a powerful relationship between age and artistic creativity. Analyzing the careers of major literary and artistic figures, such as Cézanne, van Gogh, Dickens, Hemingway and Plath, Galenson highlights the different methods by which artists have made innovations. Pointing to a new and richer history of the modern arts, this book is of interest, not only to humanists and social scientists, but to anyone interested in the nature of human creativity in general.
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author’s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture. Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic.
Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.
Almost 35 years before New York saw the first great battle waged by the new United States of America for its independence, rumours of a slave conspiracy spread in the city, leading to the conviction and execution of over 70 slaves. This text retells the dramatic story of these landmark trials.
Dealing with reasons for the end of the slave trade and of slavery, this volume emphasizes abolitionism, and discusses the persistence of the trade, particularly to Brazil and Cuba.
From radical abolitionist John Brown to presidential candidate Bob Dole to visionary environmentalist Wes Jackson, Kansas history is bursting with fascinating stories of individuals who made a difference to the nation and whose lives reveal much about our collective past. Prominent Kansas historian Virgil Dean has gathered a distinguished team of writers - Thomas Isern, Craig Miner, and others - who have crafted incisive portraits of 27 notable men and women, covering 150 years of Kansas and American history. Here are agitators who moved their fellow citizens to action over political, social, and economic problems: not only John Brown, but also proslavery agitator William H. Russell; Mary Elizabeth Lease, lecturer for the Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party; Gerald B. Winrod, a.k.a. the Jayhawk Hitler; and Esther Brown, who challenged segregation in public schools.