"Samuel W. Woodhouse, physician and naturalist with the 1851 Sitgreaves expedition to explore the southwestern territories won in the war with Mexico, kept a journal of the expedition from San Antonio to San Diego, describing the people, topography, plants, and animals encountered. This is the first publication of his account"--Provided by publisher.

As Africans and descendants of slaves have sought to expand an understanding of their history, focus on the African diaspora--the global dispersal of a people and their culture--has increased. African studies have assumed a prominent place in historical scholarship, and a growing number of non-African scholars has helped revise a discipline established over several decades. The six contributions in this volume were compiled as a result of the thirtieth Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture held at the University of Texas at Arlington. The contributors, nationally recognized in the field, represent a collaborative analysis of the African diaspora from African and non-African perspectives. Joseph E. Harris discusses how the African diaspora influences the economies, politics, and social dynamics of both the homeland and the host country. Alusine Jalloh reconstructs the mercantile activities of the Fula in colonial Sierra Leone. Joseph E. Inikori argues that slavery and serfdom in medieval Europe provide greater insights into precolonial Africa than do standard New World comparisons. Colin A. Palmer examines the power relationships that undergirded American slavery in order to better understand the enslaved. Douglas B. Chambers reveals the enduring influence of Africanisms in the historical development of Afro-Virginian slave culture. And Dale T. Graden looks at African slavery in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil between 1848 and 1856, focusing on the Bahian elite and their response to slave resistance.

Louis Rose, an Old World immigrant, came to San Diego in 1850 and was one of the key figures who helped to shape the region. This comprehensive biography addresses not only the founding of Jewish institutions in San Diego, but how Rose helped to develop secular institutions as well.

Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–1862) is one of the most important African American—and indeed American—works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene. This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work’s composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present. Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany’s fiction.