Lisa

Mutiny on the Black Prince

In 1768, the British slave ship Black Prince, departed the port of Bristol, bound for West Africa. It never arrived. Before reaching Old Calabar, the crew mutinied, murdering the captain and his officers. The mutineers renamed the ship Liberty, elected new officers, and set out for Brazil. By the time the ship arrived there, the crew had disintegrated into a violent mob and fired into the port city. After the Black Prince wrecked off the coast of Hispaniola, the rebels fled to outposts around the Atlantic world. An eight-year manhunt ensued.

At the very moment that the American Revolution unfolded in North America, the Black Prince‘s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek justice and restitution on their behalf. These private merchants used state surveillance, policing, extradition, capital punishment, international diplomacy, and even warfare in order to protect their wealth.

During an era of professed liberty and freedom, the privatization of state power was already emerging, replacing monarchies with corporate oligarchies, presaging a new kind of political power in the Atlantic world. The eighteenth-century Bristol slave merchants and subsequent generations of their families accrued great fortunes from the trade and invested it in early British banks, railroads, insurance companies, industrial manufacturing, and even the Anglican Church.

A dramatic story In its own right, Mutiny on the Black Prince makes clear how British slavery shaped the industrializing Atlantic economy and led to the evolution of the modern corporate state

The Age of Reconstruction

In The Age of Reconstruction, Don Doyle looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction. It would drive European empires out of the Americas, hasten the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignite a host of democratic reforms in Europe.

An international history of Reconstruction, the book chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.

At home and abroad, America’s Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.

Dear Oliver

When Susan Barry first wrote to Oliver Sacks, she never expected a response, let alone the deep friendship that blossomed over ten years of letters. Now, she is sharing those letters for the first time. Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks is an intimate and inspiring book, that explores the joy and complexity of adult friendships.

It began when Sue—a neuroscientist—wrote to share an extraordinary development in her medical history. Severely cross-eyed since birth, Sue had been told she would never acquire stereovision—the ability to see in 3D—and yet she did, a development at odds with decades of research. Within days, Oliver replied, “Your letter fills me with amazement and admiration.”

In a painful twist of fate, as Sue’s vision improves, Oliver’s declines. And as it becomes harder for him to see, his characteristic small type shifts to handwritten letters. Sue later recognizes this to be early signs of the cancer that ultimately ends his life. These letters are a joyful celebration of, as Oliver writes, a “deep and stimulating friendship” that “has been a wonderful and unexpected addition to my life.”

The Gutenberg Parenthesis

The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come. It reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.

Brimming with broad implications for today’s debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis’ exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.

Moving the Needle

Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? A timely investigation into sustained tight labor markets, Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.

Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs highlight the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets.

Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead

Lisa

Footer