Phillip Troutman
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300103557
- eISBN:
- 9780300129472
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300103557.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
This chapter begins with the successful inversion of United States slave traders' network of communication and transportation. In November 1841, a group of at least nineteen enslaved African American ...
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This chapter begins with the successful inversion of United States slave traders' network of communication and transportation. In November 1841, a group of at least nineteen enslaved African American men held aboard the brig Creole violently captured control of the ship and forced the crew to chart a course for Nassau, Bahamas. There, with the aid of black Bahamians and British colonial officials, they gained freedom along with all but five of their enslaved shipmates. White contemporaries tended to view the Creole “incident” in terms of its contribution to an international trade conflict between the United States and Great Britain. The revolt, however, is important for what it illustrates about how enslaved African Americans worked to acquire, disseminate, and apply geographic and geopolitical knowledge and information—what the text refers to here as geopolitical literacy—and what that might mean for their broader Afro-American consciousness.Less
This chapter begins with the successful inversion of United States slave traders' network of communication and transportation. In November 1841, a group of at least nineteen enslaved African American men held aboard the brig Creole violently captured control of the ship and forced the crew to chart a course for Nassau, Bahamas. There, with the aid of black Bahamians and British colonial officials, they gained freedom along with all but five of their enslaved shipmates. White contemporaries tended to view the Creole “incident” in terms of its contribution to an international trade conflict between the United States and Great Britain. The revolt, however, is important for what it illustrates about how enslaved African Americans worked to acquire, disseminate, and apply geographic and geopolitical knowledge and information—what the text refers to here as geopolitical literacy—and what that might mean for their broader Afro-American consciousness.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832967
- eISBN:
- 9781469600390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9780807832967.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter examines the emergence of two figures—the bourgeois woman and the enslaved African American—and how these figures brought coherence to the urban fathers' imagined new American. It ...
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This chapter examines the emergence of two figures—the bourgeois woman and the enslaved African American—and how these figures brought coherence to the urban fathers' imagined new American. It describes the central role of political magazines in disseminating an Enlightenment culture of gentility and belles lettres. The chapter discusses how the figure of the enslaved African American was informed by and reinforced the rhetorical contrast between the free and the slave that republican discourses made central to the practice of civic virtue and virtuous citizenship.Less
This chapter examines the emergence of two figures—the bourgeois woman and the enslaved African American—and how these figures brought coherence to the urban fathers' imagined new American. It describes the central role of political magazines in disseminating an Enlightenment culture of gentility and belles lettres. The chapter discusses how the figure of the enslaved African American was informed by and reinforced the rhetorical contrast between the free and the slave that republican discourses made central to the practice of civic virtue and virtuous citizenship.
