DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "History of Cuba; or, Notes of a Traveller in the Tropics" (Being a Political, Historical, and Statistical Account of the Island, from its First Discovery to the Present Time) by Maturin M. Ballou. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Early in the twentieth century, the Cuban sugarcane industry faced a labor crisis when Cuban and European workers balked at the inhumane conditions they endured in the cane fields. Rather than reforming their practices, sugar companies gained permission from the Cuban government to import thousands of black workers from other Caribbean colonies, primarily Haiti and Jamaica. Black Labor, White Sugar illuminates the story of these immigrants, their exploitation by the sugarcane companies, and the strategies they used to fight back. Philip A. Howard traces the socioeconomic and political circumstances in Haiti and Jamaica that led men to leave their homelands to cut, load, and haul sugarcane in Cuba. Once there, the field workers, or braceros, were subject to marginalization and even violence from the sugar companies, which used structures of race, ethnicity, color, and class to subjugate these laborers. Howard argues that braceros drew on their cultural identities-from concepts of home and family to spiritual worldviews-to interpret and contest their experiences in Cuba. They also fought against their exploitation in more overt ways. As labor conditions worsened in response to falling sugar prices, the principles of anarcho-syndicalism converged with the Pan-African philosophy of Marcus Garvey to foster the evolution of a protest culture among black Caribbean laborers. By the mid-1920s, this identity encouraged many braceros to participate in strikes that sought to improve wages as well as living and working conditions. The first full-length exploration of Haitian and Jamaican workers in the Cuban sugarcane industry, Black Labor, White Sugar examines the industry's abuse of thousands of black Caribbean immigrants, and the braceros' answering struggle for power and self-definition.

The first volume devoted to literary pirates in the nineteenth century, this collection examines changes in the representation of the pirate from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the late Victorian period. Gone were the dangerous ruffians of the eighteenth-century novel and in their place emerged a set of brooding and lovable rogues, as exemplified by Byron's Corsair. As the contributors engage with acts of piracy by men and women in the literary marketplace as well as on the high seas, they show that both forms were foundational in the promotion and execution of Britain's imperial ambitions. Linking the pirate's development as a literary figure with the history of piracy and the making of the modern state tells us much about race, class, and evolving gender relationships. While individual chapters examine key texts like Treasure Island, Dickens's 1857 'mutiny' story in Household Words, and Peter Pan, the collection as a whole interrogates the growth of pirate myths and folklore throughout the nineteenth century and the depiction of their nautical heirs in contemporary literature and culture.

In this broad ranging study, Gretchen Woertendyke reconfigures US literary history as a product of hemispheric relations. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre, brings together a rich archive of popular culture, fugitive slave narratives, advertisements, political treatises, and literature to construct a new literary history from a hemispheric and regional perspective. At the center of this history is romance, a popular and versatile literary genre uniquely capable of translating the threat posed by the Haitian Revolution--or the expansionist possibilities of Cuban annexation--for a rapidly increasing readership. Through romance, she traces imaginary and real circuits of exchange and remaps romance's position in nineteenth century life and letters as irreducible to, nor fully mediated by, a concept of nation. The energies associated with Cuba and Haiti, manifest destiny and apocalypse, bring historical depth to an otherwise short national history. As a result, romance becomes remarkably influential in inculcating a sense of new world citizenry. The study shifts our critical focus from novel and nation, to romance and region, inevitable, she argues, when we attend to the tangled, messy relations across geographic and historical boundaries. Woertendyke reads the archives of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Denmark Vesey along with less frequently treated writers such as John Howison, William Gilmore Simms, and J.H. Ingraham. The study provides a new context for understanding works by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper and brings together the theories of Charles Brockden Brown, the editorial work of Maturin M. Ballou, and the historical romances of Walter Scott. In Hemispheric Regionalism, Woertendyke demonstrates that US literature has always been the product of hemispheric and regional relations and that all forms of romance are central to this history.