[Review of] Elsa V. Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies, to the End of the Nineteenth Century

This is an extremely learned work. Published originally by the Pan American Institute of History and Geography in 1956 and recently reprinted in paperback by Howard Press, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies discusses almost seventy-five, often multi-volume works published between 1530 and 1898. This material includes works published in English, French, Spanish and Dutch. As the author points out, many of these volumes were originally composed by gifted amateurs who wrote with polemical purposes. The historiography of the British West Indies is a minefield of controversies about fundamental human questions which are exemplified in a distinctive locale

[Review of] John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

During the past fifteen years a legion of scholars have turned their attention to the history of slavery and race relations in America. Mentioning such names as David Brion Davis, Eugene Genovese, Winthrop Jordan, Sterling Stuckey, Leon Litwack, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, or Willie Lee Rose simply reminds us of how far scholarhsip [scholarship] has advanced since the early 1960s. A characteristic of this work has been to shift attention back from the mid-nineteenth century to earlier times and to view American slavery in its international setting. One conclusion has been to underscore the depth of North American racism even in the era of the Declaration of Independence. As John Hope Franklin put it in 1976, ”For all its emphasis on natural equality and human liberty the ideology of the American revolution was not really egalitarian.