Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans

Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans PDF Author: Serafín Méndez-Méndez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313093202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
This is the first major biographical dictionary devoted exclusively to celebrating Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans who have made significant contributions to their society and beyond. More than 160 profiles feature historical and contemporary figures from every Caribbean island, the United States, and even England and Canada, and from a diverse range of fields such as acting, sports, political activism, and more. Selection criteria included the notable demonstration of a Caribbean ethos or style, combined with a lasting and novel impact. Individual narrative entries discuss family background, education, challenges, and achievements. The breadth of coverage in Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans will enlighten and inspire students and general readers alike. Many lesser known role models, such as labor activist and educator Antonia Pantoja and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, are presented along with engaging portraits of better known personalities like reggae superstar Bob Marley and baseball great Sammy Sosa. Bibliographical sources for further research complement each entry. A wide selection of photographs accompanies the text.

Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans

Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans PDF Author: Serafín Méndez-Méndez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313093202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first major biographical dictionary devoted exclusively to celebrating Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans who have made significant contributions to their society and beyond. More than 160 profiles feature historical and contemporary figures from every Caribbean island, the United States, and even England and Canada, and from a diverse range of fields such as acting, sports, political activism, and more. Selection criteria included the notable demonstration of a Caribbean ethos or style, combined with a lasting and novel impact. Individual narrative entries discuss family background, education, challenges, and achievements. The breadth of coverage in Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans will enlighten and inspire students and general readers alike. Many lesser known role models, such as labor activist and educator Antonia Pantoja and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, are presented along with engaging portraits of better known personalities like reggae superstar Bob Marley and baseball great Sammy Sosa. Bibliographical sources for further research complement each entry. A wide selection of photographs accompanies the text.

The Business of Empire

The Business of Empire PDF Author: Jason M. Colby
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146272X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The link between private corporations and U.S. world power has a much longer history than most people realize. Transnational firms such as the United Fruit Company represent an earlier stage of the economic and cultural globalization now taking place throughout the world. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources in the United States, Great Britain, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, Colby combines "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to provide new insight into the role of transnational capital, labor migration, and racial nationalism in shaping U.S. expansion into Central America and the greater Caribbean. The Business of Empire places corporate power and local context at the heart of U.S. imperial history. In the early twentieth century, U.S. influence in Central America came primarily in the form of private enterprise, above all United Fruit. Founded amid the U.S. leap into overseas empire, the company initially depended upon British West Indian laborers. When its black workforce resisted white American authority, the firm adopted a strategy of labor division by recruiting Hispanic migrants. This labor system drew the company into increased conflict with its host nations, as Central American nationalists denounced not only U.S. military interventions in the region but also American employment of black immigrants. By the 1930s, just as Washington renounced military intervention in Latin America, United Fruit pursued its own Good Neighbor Policy, which brought a reduction in its corporate colonial power and a ban on the hiring of black immigrants. The end of the company's system of labor division in turn pointed the way to the transformation of United Fruit as well as the broader U.S. empire.

Black Identities

Black Identities PDF Author: Mary C. WATERS
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674044944
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.

The Experiential Caribbean

The Experiential Caribbean PDF Author: Pablo F. Gómez
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469630885
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.

Empire's Crossroads

Empire's Crossroads PDF Author: Carrie Gibson
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802192351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost

From the Banana Zones to the Big Easy

From the Banana Zones to the Big Easy PDF Author: Glenn A. Chambers
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the Banana Zones to the Big Easy focuses on the immigration of West Indians and Central Americans—particularly those of British West Indian descent from the Caribbean coastal areas—to New Orleans from the turn of the twentieth century to the start of World War II. Glenn A. Chambers discerns the methods by which these individuals of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds integrated into New Orleans society and negotiated their distinct historical and ethnoracial identities in the Jim Crow South. Throughout this study, Chambers explores two central questions: What did it mean to be “West Indian” within a context in which the persons migrating—or their parents, in some cases—were not born in the West Indies? And how did Central Americans grapple with this “West Indian” cultural identity when their political identity (citizenship) was Honduran, Costa Rican, or Panamanian? Chambers maintains that a distinct West Indian culture did not emerge in New Orleans. Rather, newly arrived West Indian practices intertwined with existing African American traditions, a process intensified in New Orleans’s established climate of incorporating, and often absorbing, new peoples and cultures. The West Indian population in early twentieth-century New Orleans was truly transnational, multinational, multilingual, diasporic, and constantly evolving. These newcomers to New Orleans remained conscious of their West Indian roots but were not bound by them. Their experiences spanned nations but were not politically internationalist, as was the case with the larger West Indian communities in the northeastern United States. The ways in which individuals and families transitioned into U.S. constructions of race were at times the result of conscious decisions. In other instances, race was determined by the realities of everyday life in the Jim Crow South, in which whiteness translated into access and opportunity and all other ethnicities were relegated to a subordinate position. Many West Indians and Central Americans impacted by this system learned to navigate it in such a way that their ethnic and national identity all but disappeared from the historical record. Through an analysis of arrest records, ships’ passenger records, foreign consulate reports, draft registrations, declarations of intent to apply for citizenship, naturalization applications, and city directories, Chambers recovers the lives of a small but significant population of immigrants who challenged the racial status quo.

Forts of Old San Juan

Forts of Old San Juan PDF Author:
Publisher: National Park Service
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Tells the story of the evolution of the defenses of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the role they played in helping to safeguard Spanish possessions in the Caribbean from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800

The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800 PDF Author: Pieter C. Emmer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108428371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
This pioneering history of the Dutch Empire provides a new comprehensive overview of Dutch colonial expansion from a comparative and global perspective. It also offers a fascinating window into the early modern societies of Asia, Africa and the Americas through their interactions.

Africana

Africana PDF Author: Anthony Appiah
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195170555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 3951

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Book Description
Ninety years after W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated the need for "the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica," Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., realized his vision by publishing Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience in 1999. This new, greatly expanded edition of the original work broadens the foundation provided by Africana. Including more than one million new words, Africana has been completely updated and revised. New entries on African kingdoms have been added, bibliographies now accompany most articles, and the encyclopedia's coverage of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has been expanded, transforming the set into the most authoritative research and scholarly reference set on the African experience ever created. More than 4,000 articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religion, ethnic groups, organizations and countries on both sides of the Atlantic. African American history and culture in the present-day United States receive a strong emphasis, but African American history and culture throughout the rest of the Americas and their origins in African itself have an equally strong presence. The articles that make up Africana cover subjects ranging from affirmative action to zydeco and span over four million years from the earlies-known hominids, to Sean "Diddy" Combs. With entries ranging from the African ethnic groups to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana, Second Edition, conveys the history and scope of cultural expression of people of African descent with unprecedented depth.

Home To Harlem

Home To Harlem PDF Author: Claude McKay
Publisher: Aegitas
ISBN: 0369411420
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Home to Harlem is a groundbreaking novel written by Claude McKay, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1928, it is considered as one of the earliest works of the Harlem Renaissance movement, which sought to celebrate African American culture and identity through literature, art, and music. McKay's novel is a powerful and thought-provoking depiction of the lives of African Americans living in the urban city of Harlem during the 1920s. The novel follows the story of Jake Brown, a young black man who returns to Harlem after serving in World War I. Through Jake's eyes, McKay portrays the vibrant and complex world of Harlem, with its jazz clubs, speakeasies, and bustling streets. The city is a melting pot of different cultures, with people from all walks of life coexisting and struggling to survive in a society that is hostile towards them. One of the main themes of the novel is the search for identity and belonging. Jake, like many other African Americans, is torn between his rural Southern roots and the urban lifestyle of Harlem. He is constantly trying to find his place in a city that is both alluring and rejecting, facing the dilemma of whether to conform to societal expectations or embrace his true self. This struggle is further highlighted through the character of Ray, Jake's friend, who is trying to pass as white to gain acceptance and privilege in society. McKay's writing is raw and unapologetic, as he fearlessly addresses issues of race, class, and gender. He exposes the harsh realities of racism and discrimination faced by African Americans, both in the North and the South. The novel also delves into the complexities of relationships, particularly between men and women, and the impact of societal expectations on them. Moreover, Home to Harlem is a celebration of African American culture and traditions. McKay effortlessly weaves in elements of jazz, blues, and folklore into the narrative, giving readers a glimpse into the rich and vibrant culture of Harlem. He also highlights the resilience and strength of the African American community, who despite facing numerous challenges, continue to thrive and create their own spaces of freedom and joy. In addition to its literary significance, Home to Harlem is also a social commentary on the limitations and restrictions placed on African Americans during the 1920s. McKay's novel is a call for social and political change, urging readers to challenge the status quo and fight for equality and justice. Home to Harlem is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that provides a unique and authentic perspective on the African American experience during the Harlem Renaissance. It is a timeless classic that continues to inspire and educate readers about the struggles and triumphs of a community that fought for their place in American society.