Sharika D. Crawford – författare

Understanding and Teaching Modern Latin America combines engaging, clearly written overviews of key themes with fresh and well-tested classroom approaches for teaching today’s students about a complex historical subject. This volume comprises an introduction and sixteen chapters divided into three parts, including a reflection from a senior professor about the ways in which teaching Latin American history have changed over the past few decades, as public calls to internationalize high school and college students have led to the growth of world history courses. Chapters explore a wide range of themes—including slavery, revolution, race, labor, gender, and the environment. This volume also offers innovative and practical teaching strategies, from using maps to incorporating food, to enrich any K–16 curriculum. By presenting multiple viewpoints, this book functions as a springboard for instructors hoping to encourage students to negotiate the various contradictions in historical study.

The labor of turtle hunters and the shaping of Caribbean history.Illuminating the entangled histories of the people and commodities that circulated across the Atlantic, Sharika D. Crawford assesses the Caribbean as a waterscape where imperial and national governments vied to control the profitability of the sea. Crawford places the green and hawksbill sea turtles and the Caymanian turtlemen who hunted them at the center of this waterscape. The story of the humble turtle and its hunter, she argues, came to play a significant role in shaping the maritime boundaries of the modern Caribbean. Crawford describes the colonial Caribbean as an Atlantic commons where all could compete to control the region's diverse peoples, lands, and waters and exploit the region's raw materials. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Crawford traces and connects the expansion and decline of turtle hunting to matters of race, labor, political and economic change, and the natural environment. Like the turtles they chased, the boundary-flouting laborers exposed the limits of states' sovereignty for a time but ultimately they lost their livelihoods, having played a significant role in legislation delimiting maritime boundaries. Still, former turtlemen have found their deep knowledge valued today in efforts to protect sea turtles and recover the region's ecological sustainability.