Junkanoo is a festival that was originated during the period of African chattel slavery in British American colonies. It is practiced most notably in Jamaica, The Bahamas and Belize, and historically in North Carolina and Miami, where there are significant settlements of West Indian people during the post-emancipation era. In the present day, there are considerable variations in performance and spelling, but there are the shared elements of masquerade, drumming, dance, and parading.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other places were brought to the Caribbean to work in the sugar industry. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe, later supplanted by European-grown sugar beet.
Catherine Hall is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race, and empire.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
Horace Orlando PattersonOM is a Jamaican-American historian and sociologist known for his work on the history of race and slavery in the United States and Jamaica, as well as the sociology of development. He is currently the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Patterson's 1991 book Freedom in the Making of Western Culture won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes”. The third woman to win the award, she was the first woman to win the award solo.
Thomas Cleveland Holt is an American historian, who is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. He has produced a number of works on the people and descendants of the African Diaspora. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1994.
Erna Brodber is a Jamaican writer, sociologist and social activist. She is the sister of writer Velma Pollard.
Julia Ward Williams Garnet was an American abolitionist who was active in Massachusetts and New York.
Brenda Elaine Stevenson is an American historian specializing in the history of the Southern United States and African American history, particularly slavery, gender, race and race riots. She is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History and Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As of Autumn 2021, she was appointed inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Jessica Millward is an American historian who focuses on African American history, early America, African diaspora, slavery, and gender. Her work focuses on the female slave experience by emphasizing narratives of black women during slavery.
The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prizes are awarded each year by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Nominees must be women normally resident in North America who have published a book in the previous year. One prize recognizes an author's first book that "deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality", and the other prize recognizes "a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality."
Verene Albertha Shepherd is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of social history at the University of the West Indies in Mona. She is the director of the university's Institute for Gender and Development Studies, and specialises in Jamaican social history and diaspora studies.
Thavolia Glymph is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Duke University. She specializes in nineteenth-century US history, African-American history and women’s history, authoring Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). Elected the 140th president of the American Historical Association, she is the first Black woman to serve in that office.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women's and gender history.
Jane from Bridge Town,, was an urban slave in Barbados under the ownership of John Wright. Jane's life illustrates a bigger picture regarding slavery and violence in the early eighteenth century. Jane was captured in West Africa and brought over through the Middle Passage to Barbados. She was described by her markings in her runaway ad which made Jane’s body seem vulnerable.
Ariela Julie Gross is an American historian. Previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC), she is now a Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.
Jeff Forret is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
Marisa J. Fuentes is a writer, historian, and academic from the United States. She is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and History and the Presidential Term Chair in African American History at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2009.
