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Sharon Block is an American academic who specializes in the history of race in early American history.
Block got a BA and MA (1990) in history from University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 1995. As of 2023 [update] , Block is a professor of history at University of California, Irvine, and associate vice provost for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. [1] In 2020-21 she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford University. [2]
Block is the author of Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (U of Pennsylvania P, 2018), which studies how people's appearances were described in missing persons advertisements (for runaway servants and enslaved people, for instance) in thirty-nine newspaper colonial America, to assess what descriptors of color were used prior to the solidification of racial categories in the nineteenth century. Her research question is what terms of color (black, white, red, etc.) meant in that time period. She notes that in the eighteenth century complexion, skin color, and race cannot be equated. [3] Earlier ads showed that descriptors were based on humorism, with complexions indicating health status and productivity; the idea that a red or white complexion indicated health disappeared as "red" came to be used for Native Americans, for instance. Women of African descent were often described in hypersexualized terms, and as the century progressed more and more racialized coding happened: "height", for instance, was a marker of health for indentured servants, but was used to indicate monetary value and productivity for enslaved African women. [4]
Nora Doyle, reviewing the book for The American Historical Review , said "Block's work is important both for its innovative methodological approach and for its precise analysis of the complex and fluid relationship between perceptions of bodies and categories of identity." [5]
Mestizo is a term used for racial classification to refer to a person of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to people who are culturally European even though their ancestors are not. The term was used as an ethnic/racial category for mixed-race castas that evolved during the Spanish Empire. Although, broadly speaking, mestizo means someone of mixed European/Indigenous heritage, the term did not have a fixed meaning in the colonial period. It was a formal label for individuals in official documents, such as censuses, parish registers, Inquisition trials, and others. Priests and royal officials might have classified persons as mestizos, but individuals also used the term in self-identification.
Mulatto is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in several languages, including English and Dutch, whereas in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese is not, and can even be a source of pride. A mulatta is a female mulatto.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, from 1526 to 1776, developed from complex factors, and researchers have proposed several theories to explain the development of the institution of slavery and of the slave trade. Slavery strongly correlated with the European colonies' demand for labor, especially for the labor-intensive plantation economies of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and South America, operated by Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic.
The one-drop rule is a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
Casta is a term which means "lineage" in Spanish and Portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. In the context of the Spanish Empire in the Americas it also refers to a now-discredited 20th-century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based "caste system". From the outset, colonial Spanish America resulted in widespread intermarriage: unions of Spaniards, Amerindians, and Africans. Basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spaniard and an indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a Spaniard and an African. A plethora of terms were used for people with mixed Spanish, Amerindian, and African ancestry in 18th-century casta paintings, but they are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.
Slavery in the Spanish American colonies was an economic and social institution which existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. In its American territories, Spain displayed an early abolitionist stance towards indigenous people, although some instances of illegal Native American slavery continued to be practiced, particularly until the New Laws of 1543. The Spanish empire, however was involved in the enslavement of people of African origin. Although the Spanish often depended on others to obtain enslaved Africans and transport them across the Atlantic, the Spanish Empire was a major recipient of enslaved Africans, with around 22% of the Africans delivered to American shores ending up in the Spanish Empire. Asian people (chinos) in colonial Mexico were also taken from the Philippines and enslaved. They were taken to Acapulco by Novohispanic ships and sold.
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Department of History, and by courtesy the d-school, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. An international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender and intersectionality in science, technology, and medicine, she is the founding Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Schiebinger received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), from the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and from Universitat de València, Spain (2018). She was the first woman in the field of History to win the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 1999.
Chattel slavery developed in Massachusetts in the first decades of colonial settlement, and it thrived well into the 18th century. Various forms of slavery in New England predated the establishment of the Plymouth Colony in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, but once established, colonists in both jurisdictions captured, purchased, and traded enslaved people—both African and indigenous—on a scale not previously seen in the region. Although slavery in the United States is typically associated with the Caribbean and the Antebellum American South, enslaved people were prevalent throughout New England's colonial history, and the practice was deeply embedded in the economic and social fabric of the region. Historians estimate that between 1755 and 1764, the Massachusetts slave population was approximately 2.2 percent of the total population; the slave population was generally concentrated in the industrial and coastal towns.
A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, enslaved people were freed by manumission, emancipation, or self-purchase. A fugitive slave is a person who escaped enslavement by fleeing.
Black women are women of sub-Saharan African and Afro-diasporic descent, as well as women of Australian Aboriginal and Melanesian descent. The term 'Black' is a racial classification of people, the definition of which has shifted over time and across cultures. As a result, the term 'Black women' describes a wide range of cultural identities with several meanings around the world. Being a Black woman is also frequently described as being hit by a double whammy due to the twofold social biases encountered by Black women for being female as well a part of the Black community.
Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by and slavery of Native Americans roughly within what is currently the United States of America.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Afro-Mexicans, also known as Black Mexicans, are Mexicans who have heritage from sub-Saharan Africa and identify as such. As a single population, Afro-Mexicans include individuals descended from both free and enslaved Africans who arrived to Mexico during the colonial era, as well as post-independence migrants. The latter include Afro-descended people from neighboring English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Central America, descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped to Mexico from the Deep South during Slavery in the United States, and to a lesser extent recent migrants directly from Africa. Today, there are localized communities in Mexico with significant although not predominant African ancestry. These are mostly concentrated in specific communities, including the populations of the Oaxaca, Huetamo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Guerrero, and Veracruz states.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic Slave Trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
Sally Brant was a white indentured servant in the household of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker and Henry Drinker in Philadelphia. She gave birth out of wedlock to a child of mixed race, in defiance of legal restrictions on the sexual activity of indentured servants and strong social prejudice against interracial relationships.
Native American slave ownership refers to the ownership of enslaved Africans and Native Americans by Native Americans from the pre-colonial period to the American Civil War. Waves of European colonization brought enslaved Africans to North America. Following this development many indigenous tribes began to acquire Africans as slaves. Many prominent people from the "Five Civilized Tribes" purchased slaves from their white neighbors and became members of the planter class.
Charmaine Andrea Nelson is a Canadian art historian, educator, author, and independent curator. Nelson was a full professor of art history at McGill University until June 2020 when she joined NSCAD University to develop the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery. She is the first tenured Black professor of art history in Canada. Nelson's research interests include the visual culture of slavery, race and representation, Black Canadian studies and African Canadian history as well as critical theory, post-colonial studies, Black feminist scholarship, Transatlantic Slavery Studies, and Black Diaspora Studies. In addition to teaching and publishing in these research areas, Nelson has curated exhibitions, including at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.
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. She is the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC).
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