Atlantic Studies

Primary source documents are valuable learning resources preferred by many teachers because they give students the chance to decipher and interpret the history themselves.

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety.

Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study. He first considers Atlantic history as a subject of historical inquiry--how it evolved as a product of both the pressures of post-World War II politics and the internal forces of scholarship itself. He then outlines major themes in the subject over the three centuries following the European discoveries.

Reinterpreting History, this book offers an incisive look at how interpretations of the Atlantic world have changed over time and from a variety of national perspectives. Atlantic history, which developed in the 1970s and has becomevery popular in the past several years, looks at the transnational interconnections between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa, particularly in the early modern/colonial period, rather than understanding nations/states absent a broader global context.This volume discusses key areas of the Atlantic world, including the British, Dutch, French, Iberian, and African Atlantic, as well as the movement of ideas, peoples, and goods.

This ambitious work provides an overview of the Atlantic world, since the 15th century, by exploring the major themes that define the study of this region. Contact with Europeans in Africa and the Americas, the slave trade, gender and race in the early Atlantic world, independence movements in Africa, Caribbean nationalism, and gender and identity in the 20th century are just a few subjects discussed. Moving beyond the micro-histories of the scholarly monograph to connect the fruits of those researches with broader events and processes, this book, in the editors' words, makes "a concerted effort to re-connect elites and non-elites, Old World and New, early modern and modern, and economics and culture." It will be a point of embarkation for a new generation of students of the Atlantic world.

In Biography and the Black Atlantic, leading historians in the field of Atlantic studies examine the biographies and autobiographies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African-descended people and reflect on the opportunities and limitations these life stories present to studies of slavery and the African diaspora.

In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys.

A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 explores the idea that strong linkages exist in the histories of Africa, Europe, and North and South America. John K. Thornton provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Atlantic Basin before 1830 by describing political, social, and cultural interactions between the continents' inhabitants. He traces the backgrounds of the populations on these three continental landmasses brought into contact by European navigation.

Winner of the 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title AwardThis volume offers the first set of essays on slave trading in the South Atlantic. These studies show that the Angola-Brazil complex was not the single commercial axis in this region and that Portuguese-Brazilian merchants were not alone in this business.

The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Atlantic history from c.1450 to c.1850, offering a wide-ranging and authoritative account of the movement of people, plants, pathogens, products, and cultural practices - to mention some of the key agents - around and within the Atlantic basin. As a result of these movements, new peoples, economies, societies, polities, and cultures arose in the lands and islands touched by the Atlantic Ocean, while others were destroyed.

The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670 brings together a collection of documents - all in new English translation - that illustrate aspects of the encounters between the Portuguese and the peoples of North and West Africa in the period from 1400 to 1650. This period witnessed the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, the emigration of Portuguese to West Africa and the islands, and the beginnings of the black diaspora associated with the slave trade.

Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connections among Africa, the Americas, and Europe transformed world history--through maritime exploration, commercial engagements, human migrations and settlements, political realignments and upheavals, cultural exchanges, and more. This book, the first encyclopedic reference work on Atlantic history, takes an integrated, multicontinental approach that emphasizes the dynamics of change and the perspectives and motivations of the peoples who made it happen.

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective.

A sweeping work of environmental history, The Unending Frontier offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period. John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity.