Donald R Wright
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 106821 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Donald R Wright |
| NOMBRES | Donald R |
| APELLIDO | Wright |
| FIRMA | WRIGHT D R |
| AFILIACIONES | SUNY Cortland |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 50 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 119 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1977 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2018 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Independent Niumi in the First Republic of The Gambia
Gambian independence, on February 18, 1965, was a time for celebration. And since The Gambia&s;s independence, the pace and scope of change have been so rapid and broad that few leaders of the continent&s;s new nations have been able to grasp the consequences of that change and plan adequately for the future. People in Niumi expected the government, the prime minister, and their new government representative to look after them. They anticipated p…
Niumi as part of the Gambia Colony and Protectorate
For most modern historical study, there is something pivotal about the beginning of World War I. Before the war, Europeans were imposing colonial order on Africa and people long outside the world economy were being drawn into it. For most of Africa and Asia, World War II was important in its role of moving the colonial world more rapidly toward independence. After the war, Britain was under international pressure to develop its colonies and provi…
Modern globalization
Epilogue, 2017
Niumi&s;s colonial governors, mostly upper-class Englishmen, had little in common with those they governed in the Gambia protectorate and little occasion to interact with them. Many in Niumi lodged with relatives or friends in Senegal. Some who remained, emboldened by an outcry from diaspora Gambians on top of the widespread international condemnation of the president&s;s actions, began a "#Gambia HAS Decided" campaign that used social media to o…
Archaic globalization
Niumi during late-archaic globalization, 1450–1600
Continually expanding globalization toward the end of the archaic period brought reorientation for Niumi. Portuguese merchants came by sea and connected westernmost sub-Saharan Africa first to an emerging trading network focused on the Cape Verde Islands and then to a plantation complex spreading across the tropical Atlantic. Origins of the grand intercontinental economic system, the Atlantic plantation complex, go back, once more, to the formati…
Niumi in a time of transition
Historians who deal with expansion of the world economy have not always agreed on when different parts of Africa became dependent on the world market. In their reliance on European imports to exchange for foodstuffs, which began in earnest in the last third of the eighteenth century, Niumi residents were moving toward a new form of dependence. In terms of when Niumi more thoroughly became dependent on its relationship with the expanding global ec…
Proto-globalization
Niumi during early archaic globalization
People living in Niumi, on the north bank of the Gambia River, have been involved in the exchange of goods and ideas with people some distance away for as long as there is any record. From the eighth century CE, if not earlier, western Africa was connected to the commercial complex of the central part of Eurasia through the trans-Saharan trade, and Niumi was part of a network of considerable scope and sophistication that was tied to that exchange…
Niumi during proto-globalization
Niumi was considerably more than a petty district commanded by warlords. By the time of the state&s;s thorough involvement in the Atlantic economic complex, Niumi had developed an efficient, systematic, manageable, and adaptable political apparatus. The expansion of the Atlantic economic complex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was part of a larger phenomenon associated with a pulling together of European wealth and its investment in w…
The global setting for Niumi’s history
In the late summer of 1446, nearly half a century before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Portuguese knight and adventurer named Nuno Tristao sailed an armed caravel down Africa&s;s west coast and into the mouth of the Gambia River. For several years prior to this, Sailors such as Tristao had been capturing Africans along the Atlantic coast north of the Gambia River and spiriting them back to Portugal. A year later Niumi&s;s mansa bef…
Niumi in the recent wave of globalization
Once word spread around Niumi about what had happened across the river on July 22, 1994—that a group of junior officers of The Gambia&s;s army had ousted the only president the country had ever elected and was handling government business by caveat of a military council—people were cautiously hopeful. Across Niumi during the time of the Second Republic, globalization was behind a rush to new technology. For centuries people living in that small r…
Post-colonial globalization, 1950s
The Horse in West African History
Originally published in 1980 and here re-issued with an updated preface, this book deals with the role of the horse in the societies of West Africa during the pre-colonial period. It traces the history of its introduction and its diffusion within West Africa, and examines the problems of maintaining horses in such a harsh environment. The use of horses in warfare in analysed but the non-military aspects of the West African horse culture are also …
The World and a Very Small Place in Africa
The World and a Very Small Place in Africa is a fascinating look at how contacts with the wider world have affected how people have lived in Niumi, a small and little-known region at the mouth of West Africa’s Gambia River, for over a thousand years. Drawing on archives, oral traditions and published works, Donald R. Wright connects world history with real people on a local level through an exploration of how global events have affected life in N…
The Effect of Alex Haley's Roots on How Gambians Remember the Atlantic Slave Trade
Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko ) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries…
Recent Literature on Slavery in Colonial North America
As we examine the extraordinary recent scholarship on slavery in colonial North America (1), it is important to recognize how far we have come, and how fast. When I attended high school in the early 1960s, teachers still used Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager's The Growth of the American Republic. (It was the tenth printing of the fourth edition, published in 1950, which emphasizes how long textbooks tend to hang around high school c…
The Fugitive's Gibraltar
The Diligent
Remotely Global
At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic out of the way African culture - subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything indigenous or local. Thro…
Class Acts II
The Atlantic Slave Trade and New England Slavery
Book Review| October 01 2000 The Atlantic Slave Trade and New England Slavery: How We Remember, How We Forget Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Carl Pedersen.Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860, Joanne Pope Melish. Donald R. Wright Donald R. Wright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2000) 20 (1): 7…
What Do You Mean There Were No Tribes in Africa?”
I made a mistake teaching my course on precolonial African history this past fall. I vowed (to myself) to be absolutely honest. I decided to admit to students how little historians know for certain about much of Africa's early history. I focused on the evidence, emphasizing how little there is for determining what occurred several centuries ago—let alone 2000 years ago—in sub-Saharan Africa. I gave one lecture—downright sterling, I thought—in whi…
Ominous Transition
The World and a Very Small Place in Africa
The Diligent
The World and a Very Small Place in Africa
The World and a Very Small Place in Africa is a fascinating look at how contacts with the wider world have affected how people have lived in Niumi, a small and little-known region at the mouth of West Africa’s Gambia River, for over a thousand years. Drawing on archives, oral traditions and published works, Donald R. Wright connects world history with real people on a local level through an exploration of how global events have affected life in N…
What Do You Mean There Were No Tribes in Africa?”
I made a mistake teaching my course on precolonial African history this past fall. I vowed (to myself) to be absolutely honest. I decided to admit to students how little historians know for certain about much of Africa's early history. I focused on the evidence, emphasizing how little there is for determining what occurred several centuries ago—let alone 2000 years ago—in sub-Saharan Africa. I gave one lecture—downright sterling, I thought—in whi…
The Horse in West African History
Originally published in 1980 and here re-issued with an updated preface, this book deals with the role of the horse in the societies of West Africa during the pre-colonial period. It traces the history of its introduction and its diffusion within West Africa, and examines the problems of maintaining horses in such a harsh environment. The use of horses in warfare in analysed but the non-military aspects of the West African horse culture are also …
Beyond Migration and Conquest
One of the most prevalent and widely-accepted themes in the history of the Mandinka of Senegambia concerns the great Mandinka migrations--the westward movement of large groups of people that included the distant ancestors of today's Senegambian Mandinka population. The migrants are supposed to have come from traditional Manding homelands east and southeast of present locations of Mandinka peoples in Senegambia; conquest and longterm settlement we…
Darbo Jula
Through the peak years of the Gambia River slave trade, a clan with the surname Darbo was one of several Mandinka jula (merchant) clans whose members participated in the carriage and exchange of slaves, cloth, iron, salt, European manufactures, and other commodities between the lower Gambia and its broad eastern hinterland. Itinerant merchants had conducted long-distance trade along a general Gambia-Niger axis for several centuries prior to Portu…
Cultivation and Culture
Requiem for the Use of Oral Tradition to Reconstruct the Precolonial History of the Lower Gambia
For the simple truth is that much oral tradition is mutually contradictory, biased, garbled, nonsensical, and essentially codswallop. In 1974—the same year I ventured into the field to begin collecting oral data for my doctoral thesis, a precolonial history of a Mandinka state at the mouth of the Gambia River—Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published their now much maligned work on African American slavery, Time on the Cross . With public…
The World and a Very Small Place in Africa
The Epic of Kelefa Saane as a Guide to the Nature of Precolonial Senegambian Society--and Vice Versa
What oral tradition tells us is in its way ethnography; ethnography allows an understanding of the implications of traditions... Probably the most popular and most frequently-recited oral tradition in all of Senegambia and somewhat beyond is the epic of Kelefa Saane. From southwestern Guiné-Bissau to Bondu on the middle Senegal, griots regularly play the tune of “Kelefa” on their harp-lutes as they sing the familiar refrains: The war was a disast…
Uprooting Kunta Kinte
In the late summer of 1976, amid considerable publicity, Doubleday and Company published Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family . Almost overnight author and book gained considerable fame. Americans and soon others accepted the essential validity of the story of Haley's maternal ancestors, which reached back to the Gambia River and to the eighteenth century. Within a few months of its publication Roots had been serialized for televiso…
A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa Published in European Languages
The Early History of Niumi
African Americans in the Colonial Era
Part 1 Atlantic origins: the African background the Atlantic trade the slaving voyage. Part 2 Development of slavery in English North America: the Chesapeake Carolina and Georgia low country New England and the middle colonies slavery and racial prejudice. Part 3 African American culture: African American community and culture family religion resistance, escape and rebellion daily life folk culture. Part 4 African Americans in the revolutionary e…
The Effect of Alex Haley's Roots on How Gambians Remember the Atlantic Slave Trade
Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko ) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries…
African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831
Can a Blind Man Really know an Elephant? Lessons on the Limitations of Oral Tradition from Paul Irwin's Liptako Speaks
It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind), That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. Over a thousand miles separate the Fulbe emirate of Liptako in Upper Volta from the region of the lower Gambia River, where several Mandinka states long held political authority. Fundamental differences between the areas are easy to notice. Besides speaking its own language and followi…
Koli Tengela in Sonko Traditions of Origin
Traditions of origin of most of the prominent Gambian Mandinka lineages tend to be bodies of myth containing small, but often recognizable, skeletons of historical truth. Members of these lineages typically think of one of several mythical, sometimes composite, figures as their ancestors. These figures are invariably great leaders, if not of western migrations with large followings, then of successful military expeditions in the west for the Mali…
Darbo Jula
Through the peak years of the Gambia River slave trade, a clan with the surname Darbo was one of several Mandinka jula (merchant) clans whose members participated in the carriage and exchange of slaves, cloth, iron, salt, European manufactures, and other commodities between the lower Gambia and its broad eastern hinterland. Itinerant merchants had conducted long-distance trade along a general Gambia-Niger axis for several centuries prior to Portu…
Koli Tengela in Sonko Traditions of Origin
Traditions of origin of most of the prominent Gambian Mandinka lineages tend to be bodies of myth containing small, but often recognizable, skeletons of historical truth. Members of these lineages typically think of one of several mythical, sometimes composite, figures as their ancestors. These figures are invariably great leaders, if not of western migrations with large followings, then of successful military expeditions in the west for the Mali…
The Early History of Niumi
An Account of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde (1625)
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa
The Political Economy of Underdevelopment
The Political Economy of Underdevelopment considers the aspects of the world economic system which limit the possibility for autonomous development by a country such as Senegal. Its relationship with France and the rest of the world, and the relationships of classes within the country are considered in the light of recent developments and history. A bibliography of key texts is also provided. '...this book will stand as a seminal work in the stud…
Oral Traditions from the Gambia. Volume I
Uprooting Kunta Kinte
In the late summer of 1976, amid considerable publicity, Doubleday and Company published Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family . Almost overnight author and book gained considerable fame. Americans and soon others accepted the essential validity of the story of Haley's maternal ancestors, which reached back to the Gambia River and to the eighteenth century. Within a few months of its publication Roots had been serialized for televiso…
Can a Blind Man Really know an Elephant? Lessons on the Limitations of Oral Tradition from Paul Irwin's Liptako Speaks
It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind), That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. Over a thousand miles separate the Fulbe emirate of Liptako in Upper Volta from the region of the lower Gambia River, where several Mandinka states long held political authority. Fundamental differences between the areas are easy to notice. Besides speaking its own language and followi…
Oral Traditions from the Gambia, Vol. I
Beyond Migration and Conquest
One of the most prevalent and widely-accepted themes in the history of the Mandinka of Senegambia concerns the great Mandinka migrations--the westward movement of large groups of people that included the distant ancestors of today's Senegambian Mandinka population. The migrants are supposed to have come from traditional Manding homelands east and southeast of present locations of Mandinka peoples in Senegambia; conquest and longterm settlement we…
Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Centuries. Volume IV of General History of Africa
The Epic of Kelefa Saane as a Guide to the Nature of Precolonial Senegambian Society--and Vice Versa
What oral tradition tells us is in its way ethnography; ethnography allows an understanding of the implications of traditions... Probably the most popular and most frequently-recited oral tradition in all of Senegambia and somewhat beyond is the epic of Kelefa Saane. From southwestern Guiné-Bissau to Bondu on the middle Senegal, griots regularly play the tune of “Kelefa” on their harp-lutes as they sing the familiar refrains: The war was a disast…
A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa Published in European Languages
The Cultural Atlas of Islam
African Americans in the Colonial Era
Requiem for the Use of Oral Tradition to Reconstruct the Precolonial History of the Lower Gambia
For the simple truth is that much oral tradition is mutually contradictory, biased, garbled, nonsensical, and essentially codswallop. In 1974—the same year I ventured into the field to begin collecting oral data for my doctoral thesis, a precolonial history of a Mandinka state at the mouth of the Gambia River—Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published their now much maligned work on African American slavery, Time on the Cross . With public…
African Americans in the Colonial Era
Part 1 Atlantic origins: the African background the Atlantic trade the slaving voyage. Part 2 Development of slavery in English North America: the Chesapeake Carolina and Georgia low country New England and the middle colonies slavery and racial prejudice. Part 3 African American culture: African American community and culture family religion resistance, escape and rebellion daily life folk culture. Part 4 African Americans in the revolutionary e…
African Americans in the Colonial Era
African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831
African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831
African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831
Cultivation and Culture
Platform for Change
Journal Article Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775–1865. By Harry Reed. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994. viii, 256 pp. $29-95, ISBN 0-87013-341-1.) Get access Donald R. Wright Donald R. Wright State University of New York, College at Cortland, Cortland, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 1,…
Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775
Journal Article Slavery in North Carolina, 1748–1775. By Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xviii, 402 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2197-7.) Get access Donald R. Wright Donald R. Wright State University of New York, College at Cortland, Cortland, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 1, June 1996, Pag…
History (35 obras) · Political science (32 obras) · History (27 obras) · Archaeology (21 obras) · Geography (19 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Ancient history (17 obras) · African history and culture studies (16 obras) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (14 obras) · Sociology (13 obras)