Jane Landers – författare

Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe with a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Jane Landers’s pioneering study of people of the African diaspora under Spain’s colonial rule rewrites Florida history and enriches our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom. As Landers shows, Spanish Florida was a sanctuary to Blacks fleeing enslavement on plantations. Castilian law, meanwhile, offered many avenues out of slavery. In St. Augustine and elsewhere, society accepted European-African unions, with families developing community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparents. Assisted by Spanish traditions and ever-present geopolitical threats, people of African descent leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. Landers details how Blacks became homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, and in the process enjoyed greater legal and social protection than in the two hundred years of Anglo history that followed.

This book highlights newly-discovered and underutilized sources for the study of slavery and abolition. It features the contributions of scholars who work with Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Swedish materials from Europe, Africa and Latin America. Their work draws on legal suits, merchant correspondence, Catholic sacramental records, and rare newspapers dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Essays cover the volume of the early South Atlantic slave trade; African and African-descended religious and cultural communities in Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish circum-Caribbean; Eurafrican trade alliances on the Gold Coast; and public participation in abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil. These essays change and enrich our understandings of slavery and its end in the Atlantic World. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

The illustrated story of the history and groundbreaking discovery of an important historical site, fully updated on the 30th anniversary of its first publicationMore than 300 years ago, enslaved people of African descent risked their lives to escape from slavery on English plantations in South Carolina. Hearing that Spaniards in Florida promised religious sanctuary, they made their way south to St. Augustine, Florida. The Spanish established the fort and town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first legally sanctioned free Black community in what is now the United States. This book tells the story of Fort Mose and the people who lived there.Fort Mose traces the roots of this eighteenth-century free Black town from Africa through Iberia and Hispanic America to the colonial southeastern United States. It also tells how archaeologists, historians, local residents, teachers, and politicians worked together in the late twentieth century to bring the rich but neglected history of free Black people in the Spanish colonies to the public. The site of Fort Mose is now a major point on the Florida Black Heritage Trail and has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a UNESCO Site of Memory. Research continues at the location to the present day.This second edition is updated with new information uncovered about Fort Mose, its inhabitants, and its historical significance. It reflects recent developments in community involvement and preservation at the site. And as the first edition did, it challenges the idea that the American Black colonial experience was only that of slavery, offering a story of a courageous group of people of African descent who realized their vision of self-determination before the American Revolution.Funding for this publication was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of Florida Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This book highlights newly-discovered and underutilized sources for the study of slavery and abolition. It features the contributions of scholars who work with Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Swedish materials from Europe, Africa and Latin America. Their work draws on legal suits, merchant correspondence, Catholic sacramental records, and rare newspapers dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Essays cover the volume of the early South Atlantic slave trade; African and African-descended religious and cultural communities in Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish circum-Caribbean; Eurafrican trade alliances on the Gold Coast; and public participation in abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil. These essays change and enrich our understandings of slavery and its end in the Atlantic World. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.