In September of 2007 Chris Zacharius and three other divers recovered  a single engine plane from the restricted dive waters of the Silver Banks between the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It was loaded with treasure that belonged to the dictator Rafael Trujillo. They would soon learn that a much larger treasure was hidden elsewhere in the Dominican Republic that could be worth billions. The quest for this fortune takes them into the mountains of the Dominican Re...

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead,...

To read of sea roving's various incarnations - piracy, privateering, buccaneering, la flibuste, la course - is to bring forth romantic, and often violent, imagery. Indeed, much of this imagery has become a literary and cinematic clich?. And what an image it is! But its truth is by halves, and paradoxically it is the picaresque imagery of Pyle, Wyeth, Sabatini, and Hollywood that is often closer to the reality, while the historical details of arms, tactics, and language are often ...

A groundbreaking exploration of Garveyism's global influence during the interwar years and beyondJamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. The Age of Garvey presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Ga...

Noel Leo Erskine investigates the history of the Black Church as it developed both in the United States and the Caribbean after the arrival of enslaved Africans. Typically, when people talk about "the Black Church" they are referring to African-American churches in the U.S., but in fact, the majority of African slaves were brought to the Caribbean. It was there, Erskine argues, that the Black religious experience was born. The massive Afro-Caribbean population was able to establish a form ...

Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the la...

*Includes historic illustrations depicting Morgan and important events in his life.*Includes excerpts from an account of Morgan's piracy written by his ship's surgeon.*Analyzes Morgan's legacy and current efforts to find some of his sunken pirate ships.*Includes a Bibliography for further reading.*Includes a Table of Contents. The people who have lived outside the boundaries of normal societies and refused to play by the rules have long fascinated the world, and nowhere is this more evident t...

A bite-size introduction to the life of Marcus Garvey, structured in two parts:Part 1; chronicles the life of Marcus Garvey in a first person summary form.Part 2; gives a broader view, based on what we now know, as a result of documents which have been made public by the US and British governmentsDuring his lifetime Marcus Garvey was given a number of titles; political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, orator, agitator and even the Black Moses. Letters, te...

This tragicomic novel set in sixteenth-century Jamaica is a "gusty, boisterous, [and] entertaining . . . slice of historical fiction" (Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered).Winner of the 2014 Townsend Prize for FictionA fortune-seeking band of ragtag sailors travel aboard the Santa Inez, a Spanish vessel bound for the newly discovered West Indies. She is an unusual explorer for her day, carrying no provisions for the settlers a...

The question of how U.S. foreign policy should manage relations with autocratic governments, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America, has always been difficult and complex. In The Dictator Next Door Eric Paul Roorda focuses on the relations between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic following Rafael Trujillo’s seizure of power in 1930. Examining the transition from the noninterventionist policies of the Hoover administration to Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, Roorda ble...

Colin A. Palmer was a leading historian of the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Freedom’s Children joins Palmer’s Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean and Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power in chronicling the history of British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean.

There are 27 million slaves living in the world today—more than at any time in history. Three hundred thousand of them are impoverished children in Haiti, who "stay with" families as unpaid and uneducated domestic workers, subject to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. This practice, known locally as restavek ("staying with"), is so widespread that one in ten Haitian children is caught up in this form of slavery.Jean-Robert Cadet was a restavek in Haiti from the...