Transatlantic historians are dedicated to analyzing the dynamic process of encounter, interchange, and creolization that was initiated when peoples on different sides of the Atlantic Basin first made contact and continues until the twenty-first century. The forty-ninth annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series —“Currents in Transatlantic Thought”—was organized to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the University of Texas at Arlington’s doctoral program in transatlantic history. Six alumni of the program were invited to return and present their ongoing research in this new approach to history that focuses on the complex process of interchange and adaptation that began when Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans first came into contact. The essays stemming from those lectures cover a variety of topics grouped around three unifying themes—encounters, commodities, and identities—that illustrate the potentiality of transatlantic history.

The transatlantic world has had immense influence on the direction of world history. The six illuminating studies in Transatlantic History address cultural exchanges and intercontinental developments that contribute to our modern understanding of global communities. Transatlantic history encompasses a variety of scholarly problems and approaches from multiple disciplines, and volume editors Steven G. Reinhardt and Dennis P. Reinhartz have assembled a collection of essays that reflect the diversity within the field. Introducing the book, William McNeill provides a unifying overview of the concept and practice of transatlantic history by placing it within the larger context of world history. The chapter authors bring distinctive styles and methods to the investigation of the processes of interaction and adaptation among Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans. Their studies range from the Spanish imperial crisis in the 1600s to the urbanization of Europe and the Americas, from graphic portrayals of the Atlantic world to the settlement of Ireland, America, and South Africa and the recent diaspora of West Africans. Readers interested in world history, communication, and cultural studies will find Transatlantic History provocative and challenging as it convincingly argues for the importance of this new field.

'Revolutionary Currents' explores the global cross-currents & revolutionary ideologies that inspired four great modern revolutions: in England, America, France & Mexico between 1688 & the early 1800s.

Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved. Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it has receded from the horizon. Proponents of a distinct cultural profile of these countries—all involved now in the process of Transatlantic integration—used "Central European", as a contestation with the geo-political label of Eastern Europe. This book discusses the transnational set of practices connecting journals with other media in the mid-1980s, disseminating the idea of Central Europe simultaneously in East and West. A range of new methodologies, including GIS-mapping visualization, is used, repositing the political-cultural journal as one central node of a much larger cultural system. What has happened to the liberal humanist philosophy that "Central Europe" once evoked? In the early years of the transition era, the liberal humanist perspective shared by Havel, Konrád, Kundera, and Michnik was quickly replaced by an economic liberalism that evolved into neoliberal policies and practices. The author follows the trajectories of the concept into the present day, reading its material and intellectual traces in the postcommunist landscape. She explores how the current use of transnational, web-based media follows the logic and practice of an earlier, 'dissident' generation of writers.

This collection, by an international array of historians, examines agrarian radicalism in comparative context from 1500 to the present. What unifies the studies is a shared interest in the ways in which agrarian people in the Atlantic world interacted with each other, transmitted and translated ideas, developed new crops or methods, or formulated critiques of the existing social, economic, and political order. All agree, to varying extents, that the Atlantic world is best conceptualized not as a rigid barrier between nations, peoples, and cultures, but rather a frontier, a permeable space with eddies and currents of ideas, cultivars, and human beings. In addition, as these essays indicate, "radicalism" can be found not only in the political realm, but also in the rate and extent of social, economic, and environmental change.

An investigation of US participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, from the American Revolution to the Civil War While much of modern scholarship has focused on the American slave trade’s impact within the United States, considerably less has addressed its effects in other parts of the Americas. A rich analysis of a complex subject, this study draws on Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish primary documents—as well as English-language material—to shed new light on the changing behavior of slave traders and their networks, particularly in Brazil and Cuba. Slavery in these nations, as Marques shows, contributed to the mounting tensions that would ultimately lead to the U.S. Civil War. Taking a truly Atlantic perspective, Marques outlines the multiple forms of U.S. involvement in this traffic amid various legislation and shifting international relations, exploring the global processes that shaped the history of this participation.

In 1848 William and Ellen Craft made one of the most daring and remarkable escapes in the history of slavery in America. With fair-skinned Ellen in the guise of a white male planter and William posing as her servant, the Crafts traveled by rail and ship--in plain sight and relative luxury--from bondage in Macon, Georgia, to freedom first in Philadelphia, then Boston, and ultimately England. This edition of their thrilling story is newly typeset from the original 1860 text. Eleven annotated supplementary readings, drawn from a variety of contemporary sources, help to place the Crafts’ story within the complex cultural currents of transatlantic abolitionism.

Creolization, the process of cultural interchange--in this case, between peoples of the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean--is an important aspect of the American experience. Language, literature, food, dress, and social relations are all affected by the interplay of cultures. Only recently, though, have scholars fully begun to understand creolization as a mutual exchange rather than the acculturation of colonized peoples to a dominant culture. Focusing on diverse settings and different aspects of culture, five scholars here examine the process of creolization: its origins, historical and modern meanings of the term, and the various manifestations of the complex, continuing process of cultural exchange and adaptation that began when Africans, American Indians, and Europeans came into contact with each other. While the authors vary in their approaches and, in some respects, their conclusions, they essentially agree that the notion of cultural syncretism--whether described as acculturation or creolization--is a conceptual tool of crucial importance for analyzing the interchange that occurred between peoples of Europe and the Americas. Contributors to this ground-breaking volume and their respective chapters are David Buisseret, "The Process of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica"; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "`The Facility Offered by the Country': The Creolization of Agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley"; Mary L. Galvin, "Decoctions for Carolinians: The Creation of a Creole Medicine Chest in Colonial South Carolina"; Richard Cullen Rath, "Drums and Power: Ways of Creolizing Music in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia, 1730-1790"; and J. L. Dillard, "The Evidence for Pidgin Creolization in Early American English." Buisseret also contributes an introduction that places the other articles within the context of recent scholarship on creolization

The first encyclopedic reference to Atlantic history Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connections among Africa, the Americas, and Europe transformed world history—through maritime exploration, commercial engagements, human migrations and settlements, political realignments and upheavals, cultural exchanges, and more. This book, the first encyclopedic reference work on Atlantic history, takes an integrated, multicontinental approach that emphasizes the dynamics of change and the perspectives and motivations of the peoples who made it happen. The entries—all specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of leading scholars—synthesize the latest scholarship on central themes, including economics, migration, politics, war, technologies and science, the physical environment, and culture. Part one features five major essays that trace the changes distinctive to each chronological phase of Atlantic history. Part two includes more than 125 entries on key topics, from the seemingly familiar viewed in unfamiliar and provocative ways (the Seven Years' War, trading companies) to less conventional subjects (family networks, canon law, utopias). This is an indispensable resource for students, researchers, and scholars in a range of fields, from early American, African, Latin American, and European history to the histories of economics, religion, and science. The first encyclopedic reference on Atlantic history Features five major essays and more than 125 alphabetical entries Provides essential context on major areas of change: Economies (for example, the slave trade, marine resources, commodities, specie, trading companies) Populations (emigrations, Native American removals, blended communities) Politics and law (the law of nations, royal liberties, paramount chiefdoms, independence struggles in Haiti, the Hispanic Americas, the United States, and France) Military actions (the African and Napoleonic wars, the Seven Years' War, wars of conquest) Technologies and science (cartography, nautical science, geography, healing practices) The physical environment (climate and weather, forest resources, agricultural production, food and diets, disease) Cultures and communities (captivity narratives, religions and religious practices) Includes original contributions from Sven Beckert, Holly Brewer, Peter A. Coclanis, Seymour Drescher, Eliga H. Gould, David S. Jones, Wim Klooster, Mark Peterson, Steven Pincus, Richard Price and Sophia Rosenfeld, and many more Contains illustrations, maps, and bibliographies