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Whenever I mention that I’ve just written a book on slavery and literature in Cuba in the nineteenth century, the conversation almost immediately turns to the present. Do I travel to Cuba? How do Cubans survive? How do they keep food with 40- or 50-hour-long blackouts? The present, however, is never as far from the […]
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Here in the United States, history is a recent phenomenon. This summer, the U.S. celebrated its 250th birthday. That’s not nothing, of course, but it pales before many sovereign nations in Europe that have been around twice as long. Or three times. Or four. Or more. The oldest city in the U.S., however, goes back […]
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When Maria de la Concepción boarded the ship out of Lisbon bound for Brazil, she never could have anticipated her eventual challenges. After providing an enslaved woman in Mexico with a love potion, Concepción was brought before the inquisition on sorcery charges in 1668. Two hundred and fifty years later, the extended Estevanovich family faced […]
Read MoreWhen Michel de Montaigne asked his famous question, “What do I know? (Qui sçay-je?)” in the longest of his essays, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” what he was asking was whether he could know God’s will with certainty, especially as it applied to the argument made by some Protestant and Catholic polemicists and even some […]
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Three decades ago, I came across an old report on the state of legal education in the colonies of the British Empire. I learned from the report that there were very few law schools in most of the empire. However, colonial India had a highly developed system of legal education. In fact, there were more […]
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I didn’t set out to write a book about freedom, or about the Black Atlantic. I thought I was writing a history of education in postcolonial West Africa. But the longer I spent in the archives in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, the more one puzzle came to dominate my research: why did schools matter so […]
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In 1618, the parish clerk of St Botolph’s Aldgate, in London, wrote a detailed account of a wedding he had just witnessed, ‘because we never had the like’ before. What was so unusual about this marriage was that the groom was congenitally deaf, and used sign language instead of speech to make his vows. That […]
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When people think about the Anthropocene—the age in which human activities have become a major force shaping the Earth’s climate, ecosystems, and geology—they usually picture changes on land. Cities expand, forests disappear, industries grow, and transportation networks spread across continents. Yet throughout the years I spent researching and writing Earth’s Amphibious Transformation, I became increasingly […]
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