Popular references to the Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica often focus on the legend of the “White Witch of Rose Hall.” Over one hundred thousand people visit this plantation every year, many hoping to catch a glimpse of Annie Palmer’s ghost. After experiencing this tour with her daughter in 2013 and leaving Jamaica haunted by the silences of the tour, Celia E. Naylor resolved to write a history of Rose Hall about those people who actually had a right to haunt this place of terror and trauma—the enslaved. Naylor deftly guides us through a strikingly different Rose Hall. She introduces readers to the silences of the archives and unearths the names and experiences of the enslaved at Rose Hall in the decades immediately before the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. She then offers a careful reading of Herbert G. de Lisser’s 1929 novel, The White Witch of Rosehall—which gave rise to the myth of the “White Witch”—and a critical analysis of the current tours at Rose Hall Great House. Naylor’s interdisciplinary examination engages different modes of history making, history telling, and truth telling to excavate the lives of enslaved people, highlighting enslaved women as they navigated the violences of the Jamaican slavocracy and plantationscape. Moving beyond the legend, she examines iterations of the afterlives of slavery in the ongoing construction of slavery museums, memorializations, and movements for Black lives and the enduring case for Black humanity. Alongside her book, she has created a website as another way for readers to explore the truths of Rose Hall: rosehallproject.columbia.edu.

Popular references to the Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica often focus on the legend of the “White Witch of Rose Hall.” Over one hundred thousand people visit this plantation every year, many hoping to catch a glimpse of Annie Palmer’s ghost. After experiencing this tour with her daughter in 2013 and leaving Jamaica haunted by the silences of the tour, Celia E. Naylor resolved to write a history of Rose Hall about those people who actually had a right to haunt this place of terror and trauma—the enslaved. Naylor deftly guides us through a strikingly different Rose Hall. She introduces readers to the silences of the archives and unearths the names and experiences of the enslaved at Rose Hall in the decades immediately before the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. She then offers a careful reading of Herbert G. de Lisser’s 1929 novel, The White Witch of Rosehall—which gave rise to the myth of the “White Witch”—and a critical analysis of the current tours at Rose Hall Great House. Naylor’s interdisciplinary examination engages different modes of history making, history telling, and truth telling to excavate the lives of enslaved people, highlighting enslaved women as they navigated the violences of the Jamaican slavocracy and plantationscape. Moving beyond the legend, she examines iterations of the afterlives of slavery in the ongoing construction of slavery museums, memorializations, and movements for Black lives and the enduring case for Black humanity. Alongside her book, she has created a website as another way for readers to explore the truths of Rose Hall: rosehallproject.columbia.edu.

Rethinking Rufus is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations. To tell the story of men such as Rufus-who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated-historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers' journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster's sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.

Silencing the Past is a thought-provoking analysis of historical narrative. Taking examples ranging from the Haitian Revolution to Columbus Day, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. "Makes the postmodernist debate come alive." --Choice "Trouillot, a widely respected scholar of Haitian history . . . is a first-rate scholar with provocative ideas . . . Serious students of history should find his work a feast for the mind." --Jay Freedman, Booklist "Elegantly written and richly allusive, . . . Silencing the Past is an important contribution to the anthropology of history. Its most lasting impression is made perhaps by Trouillot's own voice--endlessly agile, sometimes cuttingly funny, but always evocative in a direct and powerful, almost poetic way." --Donald L. Donham, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute "A sparkling interrogation of the past. . . . A beautifully written, superior book." --Foreign Affairs "Silencing the Past is a polished personal essay on the meanings of history. . . . [It] is filled with wisdom and humanity." --Bernard Mergen, American Studies International "An eloquent book." --Choice "Written with clarity, wit, and style throughout, this book is for everyone interested in historical culture." --Civilization "A beautifully written book, exciting in its challenges." --Eric R. Wolf "Aphoristic and witty, . . . a hard-nosed look at the soft edges of public discourse about the past." --Arjun Appadurai

A set of mutually beneficial relationships between southern slaveholders and Minnesotans kept the men and women whose labor generated the wealth enslaved.

What happens when authorities you venerate condone something you know is wrong? Every major religion and philosophy once condoned or approved of slavery, but in modern times nothing is seen as more evil. Americans confront this crisis of authority when they erect statues of Founding Fathers who slept with their slaves. And Muslims faced it when ISIS revived sex slavery, justifying it with verses from the Quran and the practice of Muhammad. Exploring the moral and ultimately theological problem of slavery, Jonathan A.C. Brown traces how the Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions have tried to reconcile modern moral certainties with the infallibility of God’s message. He lays out how Islam viewed slavery in theory, and the reality of how it was practiced across Islamic civilization. Finally, Brown carefully examines arguments put forward by Muslims for the abolition of slavery.

A major reassessment of the development of race and subjecthood in the British Atlantic Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, this book explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.