Freedom Papers is a human story of family and migration that began “with a passage from Senegambia to Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century” and “continued on to Santiago de Cuba, New Orleans, Port-au-Prince, Pau, Paris, Antwerp, Veracruz, and Mobile, with several returns to Louisiana and Belgium” (2-3). Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Cuban War of Independence). Sold into slavery in French Saint-Domingue, a colony teetering on the precipice of revolution and civil war, Rosalie’s remarkable life, and the lives of her children, ultimately connected “three of the great antiracist struggles of the ‘long nineteenth century'” (the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Hébrard provide a trans-Atlantic and trans-generational account of the Vincent and Tinchant families, whose origins began with the capture and enslavement in 1788 of a West African woman called Rosalie. In novel ways, all of these authors situate the agency of specific men, women, and children within the broader constraints imposed by big events. These works further highlight the often close relationship between migration choices and personal, often far-flung, networks and pre-existing relationships. Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2011. Mark Auslander, The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family. Again and again, the men and women in these works confound historians’ usual categories for understanding and explaining their actions and motivations. These works also build upon several decades of research on migration, family, and kinship ties, and the work of Atlantic, global, and transnational historians, who’ve called greater attention to lives and historical processes that spill across any number of political, economic, and cultural boundaries. By the 1990s, however, reaction against quantitative approaches, partly a response to the linguistic turn, set the stage for the shift in analytical modes and perspectives that historians have employed since.įreedom Papers, To Free a Family, and The Accidental Slaveowner are representative of the ways scholars today are employing more nuanced approaches to the problem of the one and the many. Social historians in the twentieth century, in Europe and the United States, sought to provide a corrective to the overemphasis on powerful men in the making of Western society through the systematic analysis of populations, communities, and group behaviors-with a particular desire to understand the lives and agency of those on the margins of society.

For the better part of a century, social historians have wrestled with the problem of the one and the many-that is to say, the problem of properly situating the lives and agency of individuals in the response to and the shaping of broader historical currents.

Freedom Papers by Rebecca J. Scott