#atlantic world

[historybizarre]

From Slavery in Virginia to Freedom in the North East of England

How an enslaved woman fled America and found safety in the North East of England

On the "bitter cold" Christmas Day of 1830, Mary Ann Macham arrived in North Shields, the northern English fishing port that would become her unlikely home; the endpoint of a 4,000-mile journey filled with fear, courage and a superhuman determination to be free. Her own description of her escape from slavery in Virginia was recorded in great detail some years after she found safety in North Shields. In November 2025, a statue of her was unveiled in the town and Mary Ann's words bring back to life a once-forgotten enslaved woman and her incredible flight from an unthinkable horror.

[streetsofsalem]

Fall Reading 2025

The stars seem to have aligned and I am all set for a fall full of reading. Salem’s Centuries is in production (and out on January 6), my new saffron project hasn’t taken flight yet, and I have a course release for the semester. I’ve written two books in five years and now is the time to ingest. Escaping into book worlds is another way of avoiding my least favorite season in Salem as well. So I…

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[clove-pinks]

Big night in the Evil Empire fandom as I picked this up from the library, hoping to cram as much Atlantic World as possible into an upcoming academic project, hopefully the professor lets me do it!

SECONDS LATER

This is why I can never take aesthetic pictures. 😔

[historybizarre]

Le Chevalier De Saint-Georges: Fencer, Composer, Revolutionary

Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges was born the son of a slave. But his mastery of fencing was his entrée into a life of high society and accomplishment.

"He enjoyed many of the privileges that a white, upper-class French person would have enjoyed in the 18th century," Valentino says. "He had a good education. He was well-off. They lived in St. Germain, which was — and still is — a nice part of Paris."

"I’m sure people would have gawked at him, because he was so good-looking," Valdes says. "He was well-dressed and very gentlemanly, and I’m sure everyone was quite delighted with him."

"But, at the same time, there’s this undercurrent of racism everywhere he went," Valentino says.

The Chevalier is the subject of a stage production and a forthcoming movie.

[clove-pinks]

Move over, other reading plans, I am now all about Broke of the Shannon and the War of 1812, edited by Tim Voelcker. I love Captain Broke, but this book is covering so much more?! From Andrew Lambert’s contribution to the book ("Sideshow? British Grand Strategy and the War of 1812″):

In 1813, British strategists had few options. They had to maintain the naval and economic blockades, to deny the American cruisers and privateers access to the sea, and ruin the American treasury; but limited military manpower meant that anything beyond holding the Canadian frontier, the dominant military effort, and Admiral Cockburn’s brilliant, small-scale, high-tempo raiding on the Chesapeake was simply impossible. Too many troops were tied down in West Indies garrisons, ostensibly against the improbable risk of an American attack, but in reality to calm the nerves of politically powerful planters, fearful of slave uprisings.

The political weight of the West Indies remained strong: the Ministry depended on the planters’ votes, and their profits, remitted in specie, to retain political power and fund the European war until Napoleon had been defeated. Strategy to fight America was bound by chains of sugar and gold to the defence of West Indian commercial and territorial power. [...] The British would not risk the sugar islands for some fleeting advantage on the mainland.

wowowow everyone is evil in this conflict!!! there are no good guys here!!! It’s all blood money from enslaved people all the way down!!! ...I mean, yes I was aware of this (even Nelson had connections to West Indies slavery), but to the extent that it was really protecting enslavers in the West Indies that made the British pull their punches in the War of 1812, and not the Napoleonic Wars, damn.

[historybizarre]

Three Centuries After His Beheading, a Kinder, Gentler Blackbeard Emerges

Recent discoveries cast a different light on the most famous—and most feared—pirate of the early 18th century

His career, like so many of his colleagues, was short-lived; within two years he was dead. “People have this romantic notion of piracy, but it was not a cushy lifestyle,” says Kimberly Kenyon, field director for excavation of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which went aground outside Beaufort, North Carolina, and was abandoned shortly before Blackbeard’s death.

Kenyon’s team has hauled more than 400,000 artifacts to the surface, from two-dozen massive cannons to a fragment of a page from a 1712 travel book—Blackbeard was known to plunder books as well as commodities. The pirate may have had a fondness for good food too, since records show that he kept the ship’s French cook. The archaeological team has also found remains of wild boar, deer, and turkey, a sign that the crew hunted fresh meat. And the team has only excavated half of the wreck—the world’s only pirate wreck to be scientifically studied

[historybizarre]

The Messy History of Emily Dickinson's Black Cake Recipe

It reveals an unexpected side to the poet's personality and the brutality that brought a Caribbean dish to New England.

Black cake is a Caribbean Christmas cake, piquant with spirits and velvety with molasses or burnt sugar. Dickinson’s recipe, written in loopy letters on age-yellowed paper, belies her biography: A dedicated baker, Emily was better known during her lifetime for her desserts than her poetry.

The labor-intensive recipe, and its journey from the Caribbean to Dickinson’s elite New England milieu, reminds us of the brutal histories of colonization and enslavement that shaped her times, and the Black and immigrant domestic laborers who shaped her work and home.

Dickinson’s black cake recipe also helps us reimagine Emily herself—not as the austere recluse the patriarchal literary establishment has long portrayed, but as a sensuous, socially connected woman who shared poems and cakes with family, friends, and her life-long queer love.

[historybizarre]

'The Greatest Heist In History': How Haiti Was Forced To Pay Reparations For Freedom

Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world, and rich countries have their fingerprints all over the nation's stunted development.

Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world, and rich countries have their fingerprints all over the nation's stunted development. The United States worked to isolate a newly independent Haiti during the early 19th century and violently occupied the island nation for 19 years in the early 20th century. While the U.S. officially left Haiti in 1934, it continued to control Haiti's public finances until 1947, siphoning away around 40% of Haiti's national income to service debt repayments to the U.S. and France.

Much of this debt to France was the legacy of what the University of Virginia scholar Marlene Daut calls "the greatest heist in history": surrounded by French gunboats, a newly independent Haiti was forced to pay its slaveholders reparations. You read that correctly. It was the former slaves of Haiti, not the French slaveholders, who were forced to pay reparations. Haitians compensated their oppressors and their oppressors' descendants for the privilege of being free. It took Haiti more than a century to pay the reparation debts off.