H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads, Christina Cecelia Davidson explores Astwood’s extraordinary and complicated life and career. Born in 1844 in the British Caribbean, Astwood later moved to Reconstruction-era New Orleans, where he became a Republican activist and preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. In 1882 he became the first Black man named US consul to the Dominican Republic. Davidson tracks the challenges that Astwood faced as a Black politician in an era of rampant racism and ongoing cross-border debates over Black men’s capacity for citizenship. As a US representative and AME missionary, Astwood epitomized Black masculine respectability. But as Davidson shows, Astwood became a duplicitous, scheming figure who used deception and engaged in racist moral politics to command authority. His methods, Davidson demonstrates, show a bleaker side of Black international politics and illustrate the varied contours of transnational moral discourse as people of all colors vied for power during the ongoing debate over Black rights in Santo Domingo and beyond.

"Dominican Crossroads explores diplomatic and cultural relations between the Dominican Republic and the United States in the late nineteenth century. Christina Davidson focuses on Henry Charles Clifford (H. C. C.) Astwood, the first Black man to serve as US consul to the Dominican Republic. Born in the British Caribbean, Astwood migrated to the Dominican Republic's northern coast after its War of Restoration against Spain (1863-1865). He then left the island for Reconstruction-era New Orleans where he became a Republican activist and preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Dominican Crossroads tracks the challenges that Astwood faced as a Black politician in an era of rampant racism and ongoing cross-border debate over Black men's capacity for citizenship and political authority. Atwood engaged in the era's "moral politics of race-making"- defined as the purposeful deconstruction and reconstruction of racist moral logic-in order to command political authority. He remains an enigma on the sidelines of US history because of a concerted effort to shield the public from the dealings of a duplicitous middleman whose extraordinary life defied borders of all kinds: national, cultural, racial, and moral"--

Christina Cecelia Davidson explores the extraordinary and complicated life and career of H. C. C. Astwood, who was a preacher, politician, and the first Black man named US consul to the Dominican Republic in the nineteenth century.

Presents a comprehensive study of the central Asian region of Xinjiang's history and people from antiquity to the present. Discusses Xinjiang's rich environmental, cultural and ethno-political heritage.

Latinidad at the Crossroad: Insights into Latinx identity in the Twenty-First Century encompasses an interdisciplinary perspective on the complex range of latinidades and simultaneously advocates a more flexible (re)definition of the term that may overcome static collective representations of identity, ethnicity and belonging.

A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost

James of Metz and Hervaeus Natalis, the primary heroes of this book, were leading figures of the Thomistic school at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth century. Their conceptions of the nature of theology, as expounded in the Prologues to their Commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences, was and is of vital importance to Thomistic studies. Because of this, Dominican Theology at the Crossroads provides the critical editions of the original texts as well as commentary presenting their doctrinal contents in the historical context. A reader can find here all the extant versions of the Prologues together with a study of their mutual relations. The results are fascinating; these two Dominicans, usually perceived as opponents, are shown to be much more closely related than has been commonly thought-not only is it shown that Hervaeus' Prologue depends on that of James, the text demonstrates significant inherent similarities between the work of these two supposedly diametrically opposed men. Furthermore, the commentary demonstrates that both Prologues are aimed at combating the criticism of Thomas Aquinas formulated by the scholars flourishing at the Parisian University in the last quarter of the thirteenth century (principally by Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines). James and Hervaeus do not merely repeat uncritically the conception of theology coined by the intellectual master of their order; on the contrary, they seek to elaborate a new interpretation of it-interpretation that, on the one hand, corrects some, perceived as untenable, elements of Aquinas' teaching and on the other, parries the attacks of the Parisian masters.

This study focuses on current healing practices from a cultural memory perspective.