About the Author

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is Distinguished Research Fellow, Southern University System, and International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Center on the African Diaspora at York University, Toronto. She is author of a CD and website database on Afro-Louisiana history and genealogy as well as of several books, including Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century and Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba.

Reviews

[Hall's] book is about getting the story right--making the marginalized more visible by highlighting historically their crucial role 'in the formation of cultures throughout the Americas.' . . . The book is a trove of new insights into African ethnic identity that challenge the earlier belief in the fragmented nature of Africans enslaved in the Western Hemisphere and the little influence they supposedly had on particular regions.--Multicultural Review

[This] ambitious study introduces new paradigms, methodologies, and sources of the complex cultural evolution of the African diaspora and convincingly challenges current assumptions and conclusions. . . . Everyone who want to understand the cultural meaning history of the African diaspora should read this book.--Register of Kentucky Historical Society

An elegant and sensible appeal for collaborative scholarship and recognition of diversity and complexity in dealing with culture formation in the Americas.--Hispanic American Historical Review

Hall has successfully constructed a comprehensive and detailed consideration of the transatlantic slave trade that succeeds on many fronts and at many levels. . . . This work is an outstanding introduction to both the sources available on the slave trade and the scholarship produced from these sources. . . . The book will appeal to nonspecialists as well as specialists. . . . It is likely to inspire further works in this vein beyond the discipline of history.--Journal of Southern History

Hall has written an innovative history of important but sometimes neglected matters. The questions she raises about African ethnicity in the New World, and about slave historiography, merit debate and answers.--North Carolina Historical Review

Historians, anthropologists, and other scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean will benefit from this excellent study as we continue to try to understand what W.E.B. Du Bois rightly called 'the most inexcusable and despicable blot on modern human history.'--African Studies Review

Important, providing a new template for critics as well as supporters, and opening up a new chapter in what is clearly a changing paradigm.--Journal of the Early Republic

In her effort at 'restoring the links, ' Hall's study encompasses four centuries of Atlantic slave trading and underscores the historical reality that continuity and change go hand in hand.--Journal of African American History

This powerful new book is the product of more than twenty years of archival research on several continents and in four languages. It synthesizes the best of the new work and, in a variety of ways, charts directions for future scholarship. . . . Hall's book deserves the widest possible readership.--Journal of American History

Thought-provoking. . . . A landmark book about African slavery in the Americas that challenges historians and genealogists to engage a whole world of transcontinental, multi-lingual scholarship that may be unknown to students of American slavery (like this reviewer) who may have immersed themselves largely in the historiography of the Old South.--Afrigeneas