Philip Morgan

Bio: Philip Morgan is an academic researcher from Keele University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Atlantic World & Frontier. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 11 publications receiving 217 citations.

Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas

Abstract: Broadly speaking, two contrasting models dominate interpretations of Atlantic history. One draws on Old World influences to explain the nature of societies and cultures in the Americas, while the other assigns primacy to the New World environment. One stresses continuities, the other change. The polar extremes are persistence and transience, inheritance and experience. An emphasis on inheritance prioritizes the cultural baggage that migrants brought with them, whereas a focus on experience highlights the physical and social environments, such as climate, natural resources, and settlement processes, that they encountered. In modern parlance, one approach focuses on folkways, the other on factor endowments. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these two viewpoints clashed, and the debate still reverberates in modified form. An emphasis on cultural continuities was the preserve of germ theory historians, such as Herbert Baxter Adams and Edward Eggleston, who stressed what immigrants from Europe brought with them when they crossed the Atlantic. Frederick Jackson Turner most famously challenged this emphasis, arguing that an egalitarian civil society and political democracy were rooted in the expanding frontier and availability of land in temperate North America. In the course of the twentieth century, the frontier thesis gathered considerable strength. Although historians of migration no longer mention the Turner school, the new environment continues to be seen as the dominant influence, whether in terms of physical resources or the evolution of new social identities. In the Black Atlantic, the frontier thesis might seem irrelevant, but there, too, the literature on creolization, stemming most notably from the work of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, saw the historiographical pendulum swing toward an emphasis on the discontinuity of the transatlantic experience and the critical importance of the New World environment.1

The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas

Abstract: The Slaves Economy can be recommended as a vade mecum to current work on the internal economy of slaves in the North Atlantic World" The Historical Association

The great war and modern memory

Abstract: of his career but also, and more significantly, claiming that here she is providing 'for the first time, a stylistic analysis of one of the American theatre's most fascinating practitioners.' That she has this justification depends, partly at least, on the fact that his plays and productions have commonly been regarded as belonging largely, if not indeed exclusively, to the realm of the popular stage, whereas she seeks to draw them within the orbit of those revolutionary endeavours which in divers European countries sought to establish a new theatrical 'naturalism' both in play composition and in play presentation the avant-garde activities to be found in the work of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Danish Theatre Royal, the French Theatre Libre, and the German Freie Blihne. That her endeavour is indeed fully warranted is demonstrated by the fact that when, for example, the Russian company and its companion organizations visited the United States various critics stressed their belief that its prod uctions 'had nothing new to teach Broadway.' Still more significant is the fact that Stanislavski himself put the seal of his approval on the activities of the American directorplaywright by actually making him an honorary member of the Moscow troupe. No doubt labels in themselves are of little or minor consequence, and no doubt on occasion they can prove misleading: yet it is of importance that we should teach ourselves how properly to interpret and evaluate outstanding achievements such as those manifested by such men as Belasco, and here Mrs Marker's study must be regarded as indeed a most valuable and accomplished textbook, or guidebook, call it which we will (ALLARDYCE NICOLL)

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2007)

Abstract: For 2007 the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, ...

Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914

Abstract: Part I. Setting the Scene: 1. The argument: mosquito determinism and its limits 2. Atlantic empires and Caribbean ecology 3. Deadly fevers, deadly doctors Part II. Imperial Mosquitoes: 4. From Recife to Kourou: yellow fever takes hold, 1620-1764 5. Cartagena and Havana: yellow fever rampant Part III. Revolutionary Mosquitoes: 6. Lord Cornwallis vs anopheles quadrimaculatus, 1780-1 7. Revolutionary fevers: Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, 1790-1898 8. Epilogue: vector and virus vanquished.

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World

Abstract: The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. "In the Shadow of Slavery" provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods - millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the 'Asian' long bean, for example - are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots - 'botanical gardens of the dispossessed' - became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.

Blue beads as African-American cultural symbols

Abstract: Blue beads are consistent finds at African-American sites. Archaeologists acknowledge these artifacts were used for adornment, yet some researchers also propose beads possessed additional cultural meaning among African Americans. For this study bead data from African-American sites in the South are analyzed. The results indicate blue is the predominant bead color. The prevalence of these items suggests they may indeed have been an important yet unrecognized aspect of African-American culture. The multiple underlying meanings assigned to blue beads are considered through reference to ethnographic information, folklore, and oral history associated with West and Central Africa and the Southeast.