Florida Historical Society Charlton Tebeau Award In this revised and expanded edition of Anna Kingsley’s remarkable life story, Daniel Schafer draws on new discoveries to prove true the longstanding rumors that Anna Madgigine Jai was originally a princess from the royal family of Jolof in Senegal. Captured from her homeland in 1806, she became first an American slave, later a slaveowner, and eventually a central figure in a free black community. Anna Kingsley’s story adds a dramatic chapter to the history of the South, the state of Florida, and the African diaspora.

Anna Kingsley's life story adds a dramatic chapter to histories of the South, the state of Florida, and the African Diaspora. Both an American slave and a slaveowner and possibly an African princess. Anna was captured as a teenager in Senegal in 1806 and sold into slavery. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., a planter and slave trader from Spanish East Florida, bought her in Havana and took her to his St. Johns River plantation, where she soon became his household manager, his wife, and eventually the mother of four of his children.

This biography tells the story of Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., a controversial figure who owned a Florida plantation in the early American Republic

This companion volume to the four-part PBS series on the history of American slavery--narrated by Morgan Freeman and scheduled to air in February 2006--illuminates the human side of this inhumane institution, presenting it largely through the stories of the slaves themselves. Features 120 illustrations.

"A consistently informative and often impressively detailed analysis of Anglo-Saxon heroic stories (especially Beowulf, Brunanburh, Maldon), this study pulls them out from under the pall of pseudo-mystical Germani-schism that has shrouded them for generations and returns them to something of their own historical, and especially political, origins."--R. A. Shoaf, University of Florida Anglo-Saxon poems and fragments seem to preserve a long-standing Germanic code of heroic values, but John Hill shows that these values are probably not much older than the poems that record and advance them. In the first book-length application of anthropological research to Old English heroic literature, Hill demonstrates that the loyalties and values celebrated in "The Battle of Brunanburh," "The Battle of Maldon," and numerous other heroic episodes in Old English literature are not aspects of an archaic or ancient ethical life but instead political models serving the interests of West Saxon kingship and hegemony. Using the much more complicated Beowulf as an illuminating counterpoint, Hill works out the development in the heroic literature of these new ideals. Employing anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives, Hill reopens for study an important subject of Old English literature long thought settled, and he provides a window onto the process of Anglo-Saxon state formation that should appeal to medievalists in both literary studies and history. John M. Hill is professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of several books, including Chaucerian Belief and The Cultural World in Beowulf.

When Americans looked to the African coast in the 1810 to 1830 period for areas in which they could settle large numbers of free and freed African Americans, they considered the Rio Pongo. There would have been many benefits to the Americans, but there also were obstacles. This study examines American interests and reasons an American colony failed to be established. It also reviews the creole families that dominated the Pongo's commerce in the 1820s.

Second edition of a pro-slavery pamphlet and early Florida imprint giving arguments for the necessity of slavery in the southern system. The first edition was issued the year before and probably printed in Charleston.

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

"Towards the end of the month of April last, some men of influence and fortune, residing somewhere in the western country, thought of making a speculation in order to obtain Slaves for a trifle. They hired Charles Miller, William Weatherford [and others], and under these chiefs, were engaged about two hundred Cowetas Indians. They were ordered to proceed along the western coast of East Florida, southerly, and there take, in the name of the United States, and make prisoners of all the men of colour, including women and children, they would be able to find, and bring them all, well secured, to a certain place, which has been kept a secret." "Advice to Southern Planters" in Charleston City Gazette. This novel, historical fiction, reunites twins Cato and Andro, ripped apart at birth, one raised as a slave, the other as the adopted son of a Duke. Their quest to find their mother leads to a race against the Coweta raiders. They deal with slavers, unscrupulous English men, pirates, and the untamed frontier. In this adventure they join Red Stick survivors of the Creek and First Seminole War in a joint race for survival.