In Buried Indians, Laurie Hovell McMillin presents the struggle of her hometown, Trempealeau, Wisconsin, to determine whether platform mounds atop Trempealeau Mountain constitute authentic Indian mounds. This dispute, as McMillin subtly demonstrates, reveals much about the attitude and interaction - past and present - between the white and Indian inhabitants of this Midwestern town. McMillin's account, rich in detail and sensitive to current political issues of American Indian interactions with the dominant European American culture, locates two opposing views: one that denies a Native American presence outright and one that asserts its long history and ruthless destruction. The highly reflective oral histories McMillin includes turn Buried Indians into an accessible, readable portrait of a uniquely American culture clash and a dramatic narrative grounded in people's genuine perceptions of what the platform mounds mean.

Covering the last two hundred years, and including Spanish America, Brazil, and the Caribbean, this book examines how African-descended people made their way out of slavery and into freedom, and how, once free, they helped build social and political democracy in the region.

Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region's long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.

Uruguay is not conventionally thought of as part of the African diaspora, yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in the country. Afro-Uruguayans played important roles in Uruguay's national life, creating the second-largest black press in Latin America, a racially defined political party, and numerous social and civic organizations. Afro-Uruguayans were also central participants in the creation of Uruguayan popular culture and the country's principal musical forms, tango and candombe. Candombe, a style of African-inflected music, is one of the defining features of the nation's culture, embraced equally by white and black citizens. In Blackness in the White Nation, George Reid Andrews offers a comprehensive history of Afro-Uruguayans from the colonial period to the present. Showing how social and political mobilization is intertwined with candombe, he traces the development of Afro-Uruguayan racial discourse and argues that candombe's evolution as a central part of the nation's culture has not fundamentally helped the cause of racial equality. Incorporating lively descriptions of his own experiences as a member of a candombe drumming and performance group, Andrews consistently connects the struggles of Afro-Uruguayans to the broader issues of race, culture, gender, and politics throughout Latin America and the African diaspora generally.

DIVIn this groundbreaking book Andrew Sluyter demonstrates for the first time that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas. In so doing, he provides a new way of looking at and studying the history of land, labor, property, and commerce in the Atlantic world./div DIVSluyter shows that Africans’ ideas and creativity helped to establish a production system so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the American colonies that the consequences persist to the present. He examines various methods of cattle production, compares these methods to those used in Europe and the Americas, and traces the networks of actors that linked that Atlantic world. The use of archival documents, material culture items, and ecological relationships between landscape elements make this book a methodologically and substantively original contribution to Atlantic, African-American, and agricultural history./div

This is an original survey of the economic and social history of slavery of the Afro-American experience in Latin America and the Caribbean. The focus of the book is on the Portuguese, Spanish, and French-speaking regions of continental America and the Caribbean. It analyzes the latest research on urban and rural slavery and on the African and Afro-American experience under these regimes. It approaches these themes both historically and structurally. The historical section provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of slavery and forced labor systems in Europe, Africa, and America. The second half of the book looks at the type of life and culture which the salves experienced in these American regimes. The first part of the book describes the growth of the plantation and mining economies that absorbed African slave labor, how that labor was used, and how the changing international economic conditions affected the local use and distribution of the slave labor force. Particular emphasis is given to the evolution of the sugar plantation economy, which was the single largest user of African slave labor and which was established in almost all of the Latin American colonies. Once establishing the economic context in which slave labor was applied, the book shifts focus to the Africans and Afro-Americans themselves as they passed through this slave regime. The first part deals with the demographic history of the slaves, including their experience in the Atlantic slave trade and their expectations of life in the New World. The next part deals with the attempts of the African and American born slaves to create a viable and autonomous culture. This includes their adaptation of European languages, religions, and even kinship systems to their own needs. It also examines systems of cooptation and accommodation to the slave regime, as well as the type and intensity of slave resistances and rebellions. A separate chapter is devoted to the important and different role of the free colored under slavery in the various colonies. The unique importance of the Brazilian free labor class is stressed, just as is the very unusual mobility experienced by the free colored in the French West Indies. The final chapter deals with the differing history of total emancipation and how ex-slaves adjusted to free conditions in the post-abolition periods of their respective societies. The patterns of post-emancipation integration are studied along with the questions of the relative success of the ex-slaves in obtaining control over land and escape from the old plantation regimes.

"I know of no other work on Latin American slavery during the decades before emancipation that captures the slaves' relentless pursuit of freedom as poignantly as does this one."--Francisco A. Scarano, University of Wisconsin, Madison "A splendid and important contribution to a growing body of literature on nineteenth-century slavery and abolition."--Frederick P. Bowser, Stanford University "I know of no other work on Latin American slavery during the decades before emancipation that captures the slaves' relentless pursuit of freedom as poignantly as does this one."--Francisco A. Scarano, University of Wisconsin, Madison

A groundbreaking collective biography narrating the history of emancipation through the life stories of women of African descent in the Americas.