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Engaging Children in Vast Early America examines the often overlooked roles that children played in moments of contact between Indigenous groups, Europeans, and Africans in North and South America over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.Adulthood is the default lens through which most of history is examined. This is because so few historians analyze the age or life stage of those they study. As a result, people of the past are often assumed to be adults when their actions or experiences align more closely with what modern society deems “adultlike.” Many of these “assumed adults,” however, were agentive children. This collaborative collection is the first of its kind to invite experts in the field of Vast Early America to engage with the history of childhood and youth. The result is nine innovative essays that expand our understanding of childhood and agentive children but also of empire and everyday life in Vast Early America.This accessible text is a unique resource for undergraduate courses in childhood and youth history, family history, and early American history.

A compelling study into the history and lasting influence of enslaved Native people in early South Carolina.Finalist of the George C. Rogers Jr Award by the South Carolina Historical SocietyIn 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to describe the population of the colony. This response included an often-overlooked segment of the population: Native Americans, who made up one-fourth of all enslaved people in the colony. Yet it was not long before these descriptions of enslaved Native people all but disappeared from the archive. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native people were crucial to the development of South Carolina's economy and culture. By meticulously scouring documentary sources and creating a database of over 15,000 mentions of enslaved people, Johnson uses a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to reconsider the history of South Carolina and center the enslaved Native people who were forced to live and work on its plantations. Johnson also employs spatial analysis and examines archaeological evidence to study Native slavery in a plantation context.Although much of their impact is absent from the historical record, Native people's influence persisted: in the specific technologies they brought to the plantations where they were enslaved; in the development of Creole culture; and in the wealth and power of the founders and early leaders of the colony. This book is an important corrective to our understanding of the colonization and development of South Carolina. By focusing on the Native minority of the enslaved population, Johnson recasts the colonial history of America, uncovering the importance of enslaved Native people to the colonial project and the complex historical connections between race and slavery.

In After Palmares, Marc A. Hertzman tells the rise, fall, and afterlives of Palmares, one of history's largest and longest-lasting maroon societies. Forged during the seventeenth century by formerly enslaved Africans in what would become northeast Brazil, Palmares stood for a century, withstanding sustained attacks from two European powers. In 1695, colonial forces assassinated its most famous leader, Zumbi. Hertzman examines the remarkable ways that Palmares and its inhabitants lived on after Zumbi's death, creating vivid portraits of those whose lives and voices scholars have often assumed are inaccessible. With an innovative approach to African languages, and paying close attention to place as well as African and diasporic spiritual beliefs, Hertzman reshapes our understanding of Palmares and Zumbi and advances a new framework for studying fugitive slave communities and marronage in the African diaspora.

Music, Health and the Body: Cross-Cultural Perspectives focuses on the role of music in understanding new dimensions of health and healing through a unique relationship between identity, social interactions and the human body under the overarching paradigm of culture. The recent Covid-19 pandemic also has highlighted the significance of social and individual factors in people's perception of and their ability to cope with the pandemic situation globally through music. Based on inter-disciplinary themes, and contributions from highly qualified international cohort of scholars, the volume will command attention amongst historians, ethnologists, musicologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychotherapists and other scholars in arts and humanities.

Illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic worldBy the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one's relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities.Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

An in-depth analysis of literary and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and their diasporasSpirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court's Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution—a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers—contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.With its emphases on folk tales, responses to the 1937 genocide, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic, Afro-indigenous collective memories, and lesser-known literary works on the genocide of indigenous populations in the Caribbean, Spirals in the Caribbean will attract students, scholars, and general readers alike.

This collection offers readers a guide to analyzing historical texts and objects using a diverse selection of sources in early modern medicine. It provides an array of interpretive strategies while also highlighting new trends in the field.Each chapter serves as a study of a different type of source, including the benefits and limitations of that source and what it can reveal about the history of medicine. Contributors provide practical strategies for locating and interpreting sources, putting texts and objects into conversation, and explaining potential contradictions. A wide variety of sources, including account books, legal records, and personal letters, provide new opportunities for understanding early modern medicine and developing skills in historical analysis. Together, the chapters highlight emerging methodologies and debates, while covering a range of themes in the field, from reproductive health to hospital care to household medicine.With wide geographical breadth, this book is a valuable resource for students and researchers looking to understand how to better engage with primary sources, as well as readers interested in early modern history and the history of medicine.