Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World

Abstract

More than 12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean and then enslaved in the Americas, a number so vast as to defy simple understanding. A growing number of historians are moving beyond the macrohistorical analysis of numbers and are instead focusing on the stories of individuals and small groups. In this deeply researched and beautifully written book, Randy J. Sparks adopts this microhistorical biographical approach. He maps a few exceptional lives of Africans in the southern colonies and states between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, and the results are as powerfully effective as he had hoped. Rejecting the large overviews that seek to illuminate the lives of supposedly typical enslaved people by researching scraps of information about a great many often nameless and forgotten people, Sparks chooses to capture “the unfamiliar, the exceptional, the lives of men and women who defy our expectations of what their lives should have been like” (p. 2).