Carribean Archives - Not Even Past

The Fellowship of the Tree Rings: A ClioVis Project

My grandparents and I looked down onto the vast Sonoran Desert from Mount Lemmon, north of Tucson, Arizona. At nearly 8,000 feet, quaking aspen, cottonwood, alder, and other tree species surrounded us—a stark contrast with the desert below. An audio guide played on my grandma’s Samsung Galaxy as we took in our surroundings. The voice, who I later learned is a singer named Joey Burns, told us about how researchers at the University of Arizona learned that fires are essential to healthy forests by studying tree rings.^[1] Burns continued, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”^[2]

Fast forward six years: Dr. Erika Bsumek sends me a podcast called The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, which explores connections between tree rings, hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and even the Sugar Revolution.^[3] The podcast is based on research from Valarie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley, reconstructing 500 years of Caribbean hurricane records by studying tree rings.^[4] It is a remarkable resource that sheds light on the intersection between climate science and history.

A dendrochronological sample from a beam in Gödenroth Rathaus, Germany.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meeting at the Second American Dendrochronology Conference in Tucson, Arizona, near Mount Lemmon, the three researchers discussed how shipwreck records and tree ring data could be combined to reconstruct a history of hurricanes in the Caribbean.^[5] After successfully reconstructing a chronology, the researchers observed a dip in the number of hurricanes between 1645 and 1715.^[6] Trouet noticed that this correlates with what is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” a period of low solar radiation.^[7]

This made sense—less solar radiation meant cooler temperatures, which is not the ideal environment for forming hurricanes. Hurricanes thrive in environments with warm water and air.^[8] But why is the connection between the “Maunder Minimum” and a period of fewer hurricanes significant? The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley illustrates the ability of climate proxies to reveal new perspectives on history that would go otherwise unnoticed. Assistant Professor of History Melissa Charenko, whose research was influential in the creation of my project, defines climate proxies well in another article for Not Even Past. She writes:

Proxies are things like tree rings, ice cores, pollen, and lake sediments. They are material traces that indirectly reflect the climates of the past. For example, scientists can use tree rings to reconstruct past temperature and moisture. Or they can use the air bubbles trapped in ice to study the composition of the atmosphere through time.^[9]

In the case of The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, researchers used tree rings as a climate proxy to reconstruct a chronology of hurricanes in the Caribbean. Their use of climate proxies is especially interesting because of the subsequent historical connections they made using the chronology.

When looking at the larger history of the Caribbean, the lull in hurricane activity can be connected with an influx in Caribbean maritime activity, specifically within the context of the Sugar Revolution and Golden Age of European Piracy, which lasted roughly from 1650 to 1730.^[10] The Fellowship of the Tree Rings asserts that the sun—and, more broadly, the environment—played a vital role in both shaping and uncovering our past. By connecting solar phenomena like the “Maunder Minimum” to historical periods such as the Sugar Revolution, The Fellowship of Tree Rings illuminates the environment’s unseen hand in transforming human history. Furthermore, by understanding how Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley used tree rings to provide insight into a larger Caribbean history, we can reconsider our natural surroundings as a burgeoning resource in explaining our past.

Sugar manufacture in the Antilles Isles, 1665.
Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72094 DLC

As I think back to my trip to the top of Mount Lemmon, I did not understand how impactful the story of a tree’s life might be to understanding human history. Human history is all too often framed as something separate from environmental history when really it should be seen as inextricable. The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley demonstrates that the environment and human history are forever intertwined.

All of this inspired me to build a timeline that contextualized their research.

For this project, I took The Fellowship of the Tree Rings podcast episode and mapped information from it onto an interactive timeline using ClioVis—an interactive timeline software that allows you to chart historical (or nonhistorical) concepts, events, and themes, emphasizing connections between them. The Fellowship of the Tree Rings lent itself well to the ClioVis format as the story contains various historical and scientific connections. After mapping the RadioLab episode, I went through the timeline and added my own events, connections, and eras to give greater context to the story.

While building this timeline, I became increasingly fascinated in how interconnected piracy, the Sugar Revolution, and hurricanes were. I learned about the complex relationship between empires and piracy. Although they were outlaws operating in maritime spaces, pirates paradoxically facilitated the expansion of empires by assisting in territorial conquests.^[11] This took place against the backdrop of the Sugar Revolution, where imperial powers scrambled to gain control of lucrative trading ports and colonies. European states sought to extract as much wealth as possible from the Caribbean. To do so, they plundered indigenous communities and violently exploited enslaved African labor.^[12]

As millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly taken by these empires from Africa to the Caribbean, some African people were able to escape and join pirate crews.^[13] This all took place during a historic period of low hurricane activity. When the idea of the climate shaping these events is added to the picture, it changes things. Did the significantly reduced threat of hurricanes to ships propel both the Sugar Revolution and piracy? In my timeline, I attempt to map out this complex history and answer that question.

As the timeline shows, contextualizing The Fellowship of the Tree Rings demonstrates the complex relationship between the “Maunder Minimum,” hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and the Sugar Revolution. Between 1650 and 1715, a lull in hurricane activity associated with the “Maunder Minimum” transformed the environment. As maritime trade increased, ships simultaneously faced a comparatively lower threat of hurricanes than in other periods in history. This meant that hurricanes did not play their traditional role in the Caribbean ecosystem—their check on human activity was temporarily weakened.

Why is this important? Between 1650 and 1715, European colonial powers cemented their position in the Americas through the Sugar Revolution. European ships transported a massive amount of wealth—including enslaved African people—in the triangular trade, which helped fund Europe’s industrial revolution.^[14] The Fellowship of Tree Rings introduces the environment as playing a role in accelerating that process, sinking fewer fleets because of hurricane activity. This connection reveals how historical periods are impacted by changes in climate, providing us with new understandings of the larger societal shifts that come with them.

Valerie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley make use of tree rings as climate proxies to establish these connections and illustrate the value of studying human history in terms of the environment. Their study joins the growing field of paleoecologists who seek to learn about our climatic history from the natural world around us. In addition to learning about climate history as it is narrowly understood, these scholars are studying the environment to learn about systems of power, like the rise of the Sugar Revolution and its relationship with the Golden Age of European Piracy.

Historians often leave out an important voice in their stories: the planet. In The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, we hear about the environment’s role in one of the most formative time periods in the Western Hemisphere, the Sugar Revolution and the Golden Age of European Piracy. As we enter an era defined by human-made climate change, it is even more important to understand the historical relationship between social changes and the climate. Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley tell us to first look at the environment itself.

Now, when I reflect on my work contextualizing The Fellowship of Tree Rings, I think again about what Joey Burns meant when he said, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”[15] A tree’s rings are not just the story of its life but a perspective on the history of the world around it.

Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major studying to become a public high school history teacher. He is interested in environmental history, resistance movements, and histories of the Americas. As a future history teacher, Aidan hopes to teach history critically and bridge the community-classroom divide. He is currently a ClioVis intern.

^[1] Joey Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour” (Audio Tour, University of Arizona College of Science, 2015).

^[2] Burns.

^[3] Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings,” RadioLab, accessed October 25, 2023, https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/fellowship-tree-rings/transcript.

^[4] Valerie Trouet, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 203.

^[5] Trouet, 201.

^[6] Trouet, 204.

^[7] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[8] Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Elizabeth P. Manar, eds. “Hurricane.” In U-X-L Encyclopedia of Weather and Natural Disasters, 398–407. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2016.

^[9] Charenko, Melissa. “IHS Climate in Context: Climate by Proxy.” Not Even Past, December 15, 2020. https://notevenpast.org/ihs-climate-in-context-climate-by-proxy/.

^[10] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[11] Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge (Mass.): London Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

^[12] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar, and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 1972), 50–68.

^[13] Aimee Wodda, “Piracy in Colonial Era,” in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1st ed. (Wiley, 2013), 2, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj528.

^[14] Barry W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” The Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2000): 213.

^[15] Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill

For approximately three centuries, the greater Caribbean hosted the Spanish empire‘s most important social, environmental, and political connections. Interactions between people, the environment, and mosquitoes played an essential part in this history, as John McNeill explains in Mosquito Empires. A professor of history at Georgetown University, McNeill uses his book to explore the links between ecology, disease, and Atlantic politics in the Greater Caribbean from 1620 until 1914. Mosquito Empires won the Albert J. Beveridge prize from the American Historical Association in 2011.

Mosquito Empires serves as an excellent introduction to the field of environmental history. It opens an exciting pathway to understanding how the past’s ecological, political, and epidemic problems continue to impact our present. McNeill makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies through connections to different fields, including history, politics, epidemiology, climatology, ecology, and others.

Book cover for Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill.

Throughout Mosquito Empires, we find examples that show ecology shaped the history of the Americas because of environmental changes and human agency. Its title is suggestive of the relevance of mosquitoes in an imperial age. McNeill also touches on other subjects, including the transport of animals between continents and the ways in which existing fauna exercised agency to influence how people occupied territory. Furthermore, Mosquito Empires allows us to recognize the role of disease in human and environmental history. As such, it may be even more interesting today, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As McNeill points out, humans prefer to understand and explain history based on human affairs such as war, revolutions, or conquest. But sometimes, we forget our ecological agency in the environment as a part of our history. McNeill’s book shows co-evolutionary processes bridging the gap between society and nature, demonstrating that the agency of mosquitoes is as important as human agency.

Mosquito Empires also helps us comprehend how the significance and understanding of disease has changed over time. For instance, many diseases did not impact all of the Spanish Empire’s diverse populations in the same way. Diseases encounter different environments, immunities, and susceptibilities as they spread. Moreover, as parts of an ecological chain, certain diseases depended on specific circumstances for transmission: temperature, flora, and land conditions determined how contagious they were. Consequently, McNeill also considers some unique features of malaria and yellow fever, which required mosquitos to spread.

McNeill uses a scalar perspective, beginning his analysis on a global scale before moving towards a local space. Mosquito Empires starts by looking at the Spanish empire from an Atlantic perspective and then focuses on its Caribbean ecology. From 1620 until 1820, the linkages between ecological and political affairs occupied most of the central historical interactions in the Caribbean. Atlantic American geopolitics gave local politics an ecological focus during the early colonial period when Spanish authorities focused on preserving Indigenous and enslaved populations because they provided a labor force for the Spanish empire. The colonizers also built plantations, which occupied most territories in Brazil and the Americans during this period and were more important than silver and gold mines or other sources of economic activity. Also, the creation of plantation systems helped the permanence of mosquitos, producing the conditions necessary for the ongoing existence of diseases. At the same time, geopolitical turbulence in Atlantic America coincided with ecological transformations in the Greater Caribbean. Most of their impacts were related to the introduction of new plants and animals in the Americas, which affected preexisting environmental conditions.

A drawing depicting a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua. — *This nineteenth-century drawing depicts a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

One of the most exciting contributions made by Mosquito Empires is its creation of a unified historical and ecological framework for analyzing epidemiologic problems. Through his book, we can gain new insights into diseases by studying them in a single ecological and historical context. Mosquito Empires considers many variables: demography, ecology, immunity, and climate changes which could affect the spread of diseases in the Caribbean. McNeill compares how yellow fever affected Caribbean locals and European immigrants; he also shows that the disease impacted rural areas (where plantations were located) more than urban ones.

Other factors such as climate change and European immigration, contributed to the spread of diseases, leading to variations across time and space. McNeill’s framework shows how yellow fever’s agency operates and examines its transmission, immunity, and impact on humans and across landscapes. Nonetheless, the disease did not make its history by itself. As McNeill demonstrates, yellow fever acquired historical relevance only when it became an epidemic and had a persistent cycle of transmission. Through this argument, the author shows how human activity converted a diminutive organism into a historical and ecological concern for many years.

Another outstanding feature of McNeill’s book is the diversity of manuscript sources it taps, many of which come from Iberic-American archives. The demographic and health features presented in the book are essential to consider the perception of the disease, but also the knowledge (scientific or empirical) to cure or resolve the epidemics. Case studies examine Brazil, Jamaica, Kourou, Darien, and The Viceroyalty of New Granada. Mosquito Empires performs a valuable service just by gathering so much information. But the information is also critical to the book’s central aim because it documents the disasters created by geopolitical colonialism. According to McNeill, these events show “the power of imported diseases, after the 1640s establishment of yellow fever in the region, to prevent new large-scale European settlement in the Greater Caribbean (p. 135).”

Mosquito Empires serves to remind historians of the role of diseases in our environment. McNeill’s book presents a history of empire’s power as shown through the links between ecological and political matters. McNeill describes the mosquitoes as shields of empire, but readers should also consider them as actors in this geopolitical puzzle. Mosquitoes were protagonists with agency and specific power, capable of defending (through immunity) or destroying (through mortality) an army or a population group; they could also transform the environment.

Cindia Arango López is a doctoral student at UT Austin at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. She studies the relationship between the environmental and social history of the Magdalena River and its navigators, the bogas, during the 18th century in Colombia. She has researched thematics about enslaved history in the colonial period in Colombia. Also, she published relating to the current territorial dynamics of displacement in Colombia from a human geography perspective.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Intra-American Slave Trade Database: A Review and Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

In 2018, Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki published the Intra-American Slave Trade database to the Slave Voyages project, which now records more than 27,000 slave voyages across the Americas.^[1] After enslaved people disembarked from their forced Trans-Atlantic journeys, many more were re-shipped and dispersed across the Americas to French, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese outposts and ports. Each unit in the database is composed of a single vessel’s voyage between its place of embarkation and disembarkation of captives. Sources such as port logs, merchant papers, and the logs of import duties record the arrival and departure of slaving vessels. The database includes records on voyages dating from the mid-sixteenth century to the later end of the mid-nineteenth century.

Screenshot of the homepage of the Intra-American Slave Trade Database which reads: This database contains information on more than 11,000 maritime voyages trafficking enslaved people within the Americas. These slave trades operated within colonial empires, across imperial boundaries, and inside the borders of nations such as the United States and Brazil. Explore the forced removals, which not only dispersed African survivors of the Atlantic crossing but also displaced enslaved people born in the Americas.

In line with the theme of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives,” O’Malley and Borucki’s project sheds light on the significance of Latin America in the broader interconnected development of Atlantic Slavery throughout the Americas. Those visiting the database will find that the bulk of the intra-American slave trade was directed predominately towards the Spanish American mainland and Caribbean colonies. Indeed, the mainland Spanish colonies alone received 38% of the total volume of the Intra-American slave trade that crossed colonial boundaries.^[2]

Notable re-export colonies included Portuguese Brazil and British Jamaica, where local merchants transshipped many thousands of enslaved people to other colonies. Such data illuminates the importance of what scholars have referred to as the entangled and integrated nature of the broader Atlantic world. Moreover, the data presented by the database illustrates the centrality of Latin America in broader conversations about the Atlantic concerning archives, slavery, and the African diaspora.

In my interview with O’Malley and Borucki, I asked a series of questions, encouraging them to reflect on some of the project’s significant challenges, insights, and contributions. In what follows is a brief introduction to their work through an abridged recap of our engaging conversation.[3] Borucki’s initial research examined enslaved people working on cattle ranches along the borders between Uruguay and Brazil. While working on his dissertation under the supervision of David Eltis, who was then compiling the first online iteration of the TAST (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) database, Borucki came across extensive documentation of trans-imperial slave trafficking leading to the colonies in the Rio de la Plata and Venezuela. Since that time, his focus has been on slave trafficking and the routes enslaved people took, shaping their experiences and identities in Latin America (particularly Montevideo and Buenos Aires). O’Malley’s interest in the intra-American slave trade was also sparked after encountering a profuse body of records documenting inter-imperial slave trafficking between different British imperial colonies.

This court register is an example of the resources available through the Slave Trade database. The photo shows the first page of the court’s register of "Liberated Africans" taken from the "Felicidade The Brigantine," a ship captured at sea by British cruisers and adjudicated at a court established at Sierra Leone under international anti-slave trade treaties. The register was kept as a formal record of emancipation that helped protect the individual from subsequent re-enslavement. — This court register is an example of the resources available through the Slave Trade database. The photo shows the first page of the court’s register of “Liberated Africans” taken from the “Felicidade The Brigantine,” a ship captured at sea by British cruisers and adjudicated at a court established at Sierra Leone under international anti-slave trade treaties. The register was kept as a formal record of emancipation that helped protect the individual from subsequent re-enslavement. The image is reproduced courtesy of the British National Archives. Source: British National Archives, Foreign Office, ser. 84, vol. 231, p. 177.

Among the many challenges O’Malley and Borucki faced compiling the database, perhaps the most significant was accounting for the issue of the intra-American contraband slave trade. While scholars have widely acknowledged evidence of the commonplace and ubiquity of illicit slave trafficking, accounting for the phenomena in the database posed a methodological challenge. The difficulties in acquiring and assessing records of clandestine slave trafficking challenge the ability to quantitatively account for it since a single slave voyage constitutes a unit in the database. Furthermore, Borucki notes that in many instances, the records that account for enslaved people as contraband lack sufficient details and information necessary for the identification of a slave voyage.

For example, he explains that in Venezuela, the records for the enslaved people who entered as contraband, as documented in individual records, show that they become legalized property through a regulated process called indulto. However, these sources lack information to connect these individuals to a specific slave voyage. Like the issue of accounting for the illicit slave trade, O’Malley notes the lack of data on the intra-American slave trade to the French Caribbean, which he and Borucki recognize as being vastly underrepresented in the database. Throughout much of the colonial period, the French colonies were on the receiving end of this contraband trafficking however, as Borucki observed, the French seldom produced records detailing these networks from their vantage point.

Nevertheless, in tracing the trafficking of enslaved people across imperial boundaries, O’Malley stated that “building the database forced me to reckon with how entangled empires were.” “I thought when I was starting out that I was mostly working on a project of movements of people within the British Empire and especially from the Caribbean to the North American colonies,” he explains. “But during the quantitative work of tracking all of these movements, I came across all of these voyages going out from Jamaica and other places, to Spanish colonies and French colonies.”

In Borucki’s research on Black social organizations and Catholic confraternities in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, he found that many enslaved people were not African-born but were born and trafficked from Brazil. Such communities had forged networks and connections between the Rio de la Plata and Brazil, further illustrating the importance of intra-American slave trading. Likewise, Borucki explains that this project raises questions about the trafficking of slaves and the trans-imperial formation of Black communities––their movement, experiences, and ideas that flow between imperial borders. Together these complicate our idea of trans-imperial connections.

Enslaved people disembarking for sale at harbor in Brazil at some time in between the 1820s and 1830s. Source: “Debarquement”, Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora

For O’Malley, “the thing that’s most striking with the intra-American database, specifically, is the sense of the scope of slavery in the Americas.” Indeed, while the Trans-Atlantic slave trade gives you the immense scale of transatlantic trafficking, “those voyages tend to go to a relatively small number of ports over and over again.” However, the Intra-American database draws our attention to those far-flung outposts, colonial backwaters, and ports, that when viewed together with the TAST data, truly illustrate the ubiquity of slavery across the Americas. In particular, Borucki points out that there was “a very active traffic in slaves in the Pacific “from Panama going down to a Lima, Peru, also across South America, from Buenos Aires going down to the Magellan straits and then north into Lima, and also from Central America going north as well.”

It is his hope that future historians will be able to capture this data, “to have some kind of representation really––– each little archive in Oaxaca, in Michoacán, in the western parts of Mexico have records on enslaved people of African ancestry being moved around to the confines of the Americas.” As new research continues to come to the fore adding new perspectives to the way we understand the broader history of the African diaspora and slavery across the Americas, the intra-American database will continue to be of importance to a wide variety of educators and scholar.

Borucki is a contributor to the upcoming 2022 Lozano Long Conference, honoring the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, entitled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” Readers interested in learning more about their work are encouraged and invited to attend their panel at the conference entitled “Public, Access, and the Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities.” For more information, stay tuned for updates at PORTAL, the Llilas Benson Latin American Studies and Collections official online magazine.

Clifton E. Sorrell III is a third year History PhD student at the University of Austin at Texas. He earned a B.A in both African American Studies and History at the University of California, Davis, and is currently studying Atlantic Slavery and the African Diaspora under Professor Daina Ramey Berry. He is broadly interested in the politics of African Diaspora Freedom practice in the Anglophone-Spanish Caribbean in between the 17th and 18th century. His research covers a broad set of questions concerning African diasporic resistance in the inter-imperial geo-politics of the circum-Caribbean, gender, diasporic cultural politics and social recreation.

^[1] “Intra-American Slave Trade,” Slave Voyages. Accessed November 10th, 2021. https://www.slavevoyages.org/american/about#methodology/0/introduction/0/en/

^[2] Ibid

^[3] I would like to thank Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki for taking the time to meet with me to conduct this interview. Clifton Sorrell in Conversation with (Authors) Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki (Conducted Nov. 9, 2021).

Episode 118: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity

Host: Christopher Rose, Department of History
Guest: Megan Raby, Department of History

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research.

Megan Raby describes how, from these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American “tropical biologists” developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.

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