Edda L. Fields-Black | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Historian |
Spouse | Samuel Black |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania |
Thesis | Rice farmers in the Rio Nunez region: A social history of agricultural technology and identity in coastal Guinea, ca. 2000 BCE to 1880 CE (2001) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Carnegie Mellon University |
Main interests | West African rice agriculture and anthropology,Gullah history and culture,Rio Nunez languages |
Notable works | Deep Roots:Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008) |
Website | fieldsblack |
Edda L. Fields-Black (born Edda L. Fields) is an African-American historian who is currently associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is known for her research on West African rice agriculture and societies [1] and the African diaspora.
Raised in Miami,Fields-Black grew up with her paternal grandparents,Jim Fields and Mamie Fields,who were Gullah speakers from Green Pond,South Carolina. [2]
Fields-Black earned a BA degree in English and History from Emory University and an MA degree in history from the University of Florida,before earning MA and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania,where she wrote her dissertation on the anthropology of rice farmers in the Nunez River region of Guinea. [3] [4]
Apart from her research on rice agriculture in coastal Guinea and Sierra Leone,Fields-Black has also performed research on the Gullah Geechee people, [5] the Trans-Atlantic slave trade,and other topics in African-American history. [6]
Fields-Black is also known for her work on the Rio Nunez languages,Nalu language,Mel languages,and other Atlantic languages of West Africa. [7]
Fields-Black's books include Deep Roots:Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and the co-edited volume Rice:Global Networks and New Histories. [8] [9] She completed a study on Harriet Tubman during the Civil War,enslaved Lowcountry rice laborers,and the Combahee River Raid. [10]
She is married to Samuel Black, a historian, curator, and archivist who is director of African-American programs at the Senator John Heinz History Center. [14] The pair was featured together in an episode of StoryCorps in 2006; Samuel talks to Edda Fields-Black about his relationships with his father and work throughout the episode, which aired on NPR's Morning Edition . [15]
Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people, an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.
The Gullah are an African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Their language and culture have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms as a result of their historical geographic isolation and the community's relation to their shared history and identity.
The Lowcountry is a geographic and cultural region along South Carolina's coast, including the Sea Islands. The region includes significant salt marshes and other coastal waterways, making it an important source of biodiversity in South Carolina.
The Combahee River is a short blackwater river in the southern Lowcountry region of South Carolina formed at the confluence of the Salkehatchie and Little Salkehatchie rivers near the Islandton community of Colleton County, South Carolina. Part of its lower drainage basin combines with the Ashepoo River and the Edisto River to form the ACE Basin. The Combahee empties into Saint Helena Sound near Beaufort, which in turn empties into the Atlantic Ocean.
Baga, or Barka, is a dialect cluster spoken by the Baga people of coastal Guinea. The name derives from the phrase bae raka Slaves trading place and understood by the local as 'people of the seaside' outcasted people. Most Baga are bilingual in the Mande language Susu, the official regional language. Two ethnically Baga communities, Sobané and Kaloum, are known to have abandoned their (unattested) language altogether in favour of Susu.
Marquetta L. Goodwine is a non-sovereign, elected monarch who serves as Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah Geechee Nation. She is an author, preservationist, and performance artist.
Atlantic Creole is a cultural identifier of those with origins in the transatlantic settlement of the Americas via Europe and Africa.
The Raid on Combahee Ferry was a military operation during the American Civil War conducted on June 1 and June 2, 1863, by elements of the Union Army along the Combahee River in Beaufort and Colleton counties in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Joseph A. Opala, OR is an American historian noted for establishing the "Gullah Connection," the historical links between the indigenous people of the West African nation of Sierra Leone and the Gullah people of the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States.
Peter Hutchins Wood is an American historian and author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974). It has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. A former professor at Duke University in North Carolina, Dr. Wood is now an adjunct professor in the History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, where his wife, Elizabeth A. Fenn is a professor emeritus in the History Department.
The Mel languages are a branch of Niger–Congo languages spoken in Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The most populous is Temne, with about two million speakers; Kissi is next, with half a million.
Sierra Leonean Americans are an ethnic group of Americans of full or partial Sierra Leonean ancestry. This includes Sierra Leone Creoles whose ancestors were African American Black Loyalists freed after fighting on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War. Some African Americans trace their roots to indigenous enslaved Sierra Leoneans exported to the United States between the 18th and early 19th century. In particular, the Gullah people of partial Sierra Leonean ancestry, fled their owners and settled in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands, where they still retain their cultural heritage. The first wave of Sierra Leoneans to the United States, after the slavery period, was after the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the American Community Survey, there are 34,161 Sierra Leonean immigrants living in the United States.
Nunez River or Rio Nuñez (Kakandé) is a river in Guinea with its source in the Futa Jallon highlands. It is also known as the Tinguilinta River, after a village along its upper course.
Mbulungish is a Rio Nunez language of Guinea. Its various names include Baga Foré, Baga Monson, Black Baga, Bulunits, Longich, Monchon, Monshon. Wilson (2007) also lists the names Baga Moncõ. The language is called Ciloŋic (ci-lɔŋic) by its speakers, who refer to themselves as the Buloŋic (bu-lɔŋic).
Mboteni, also known as Baga Mboteni, Baga Binari, or Baga Pokur, is an endangered Rio Nunez language spoken in the coastal Rio Nunez region of Guinea. Speakers who have gone to school or work outside their villages are bilingual in Pokur and the Mande language Susu.
Flying Africans are figures of African diaspora legend who escape enslavement by a magical passage back over the ocean. Most noted in Gullah culture, they also occur in wider African-American folklore, and in that of some Afro-Caribbean peoples.
The Rio Nunez or Nunez River languages constitute a pair of Niger–Congo languages, Mbulungish and Baga Mboteni. They are spoken at the mouth of the Nunez River in Guinea, West Africa.
The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, in both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. They developed a creole language, also called Gullah, and a culture with some African influence.
Benjamin "BJ" Dennis IV is an American Gullah Geechee chef and caterer from Charleston, South Carolina who is known for preserving Gullah Geechee cooking and culture. Additionally, he is also notable for his discovery of hill rice in December 2016 in Trinidad, which was thought to have been extinct.
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