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The Common Wind

By Julius S. Scott & Marcus Rediker
The Common Wind by Julius S. Scott & Marcus Rediker digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

This widely acclaimed and influential work of African American history traces the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era.

“An important part of the tradition of scholarship that puts the end of modern slavery in a global perspective.” —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams and Race Rebel

Out of the grey expanse of official records in Spanish, English and French, The Common Wind provides a gripping and colorful account of inter-continental communication networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the new world, offering a powerful “history from below.”
 
Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution. By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved.

Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for 32 years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

About Julius S. Scott

Julius S. Scott is a lecturer of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad, about how the Amistad Mutiny of 1839 lives on today in popular memory among the people of Sierra Leone.

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