Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!
If you are:
this thread is for you ALL!
Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!
We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.
For this round, let’s look at: Black Atlantic!
Let’s take some time this week to acknowledge, celebrate, and honor the people, culture, and history described as Black Atlantic. Use this space to share stories of cultural fusion, the impact of the Atlantic and Trans-Atlantic slave trade on the African diaspora, and the histories of those who were carried across the water.
I want to shamelessly plug a couple things I have done here, an answer on the origin of sea shanties and an AskHistorians Podcast episode about the history of the banjo. Both have significant contributions from Black people around the Atlantic, and yet both are generally coded as "white" in a lot of musical contexts today. It's a little window into how a lot of culture, especially in the Americas, was shaped by the Black Atlantic, and how a lot of that history has been "conveniently" forgotten in favor of different narratives.
If you haven't read Tim Reiss's "The Black Count" you're missing out. The real-life story of a man born into slavery on what is now Haiti, the son of a French Marquis. He was taken to Paris where he became free, was educated, and later rose through the ranks of the French military alongside Napoleon during the turbulent period of the French Revolution. The later events of his life (tales of great heroism, adventure, and betrayal) would later inspire the story of The Count of Monte-Christo, written by his son Alexandre Dumas. It's an amazing peek into a highly eventful era in history and a familiar story of a society grappling with issues of equality and the scramble for power.
Is anyone else reading African Founders by David Hackett Fischer? I'm working my way through the audio book, and thus far I've really enjoyed it. I'd love to hear thoughts from actual historians.
I hope I'm not embarrassing myself here, but I was wondering what other historians, amateur and otherwise, think of Amistad (1997). It suffers from a lot of white savior nonsense and historical liberties taken, but I find it to be a very moving film despite all that.
Personally and whenever I'm teaching, I like using relevant films to ground my thinking any discussion, and Amistad has been helpful for me there (especially re: abolitionists, maritime law, pre-Civil War politics), but I'm curious about what other folks think.