Black Jacks
African American Seamen in the Age of Sail
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3537482 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sari Hornstein (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 156 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, W Jeffrey Bolster, 1997 |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2674336 |
| OpenAlex | W2069425679 |
| Language | EN |
Few Americans, black or white, recognize the degree to which early African American history is a maritime history. W. Jeffrey Bolster shatters the myth that black seafaring in the age of sail was limited to the Middle Passage. Seafaring was one of the most significant occupations among both enslaved and free black men between 1740 and 1865. Tens of thousands of black seamen sailed on lofty clippers and modest coasters. They sailed in whalers, warships, and privateers. Some were slaves, forced to work at sea, but by 1800 most were free men, seeking liberty and economic opportunity aboard ship. Bolster brings an intimate understanding of the sea to this extraordinary chapter in the formation of black America. Because of their unusual mobility, sailors were the eyes and ears to worlds beyond the limited horizon of black communities ashore. Sometimes helping to smuggle slaves to freedom, they were more often a unique conduit for news and information of concern to blacks. But for all its opportunities, life at sea was difficult. Blacks actively contributed to the Atlantic maritime culture shared by all seamen, but were often outsiders within it. Capturing that tension, Black Jacks examines not only how common experiences drew black and white sailors together--even as deeply internalized prejudices drove them apart--but also how the meaning of race aboard ship changed with time. Bolster traces the story to the end of the Civil War, when emancipated blacks began to be systematically excluded from maritime work. Rescuing African American seamen from obscurity, this stirring account reveals the critical role sailors played in helping forge new identities for black people in America. An epic tale of the rise and fall of black seafaring, Black Jacks is African Americans' freedom story presented from a fresh perspective
Aeronautics · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Engineering · History
Transnationalism and nationalism in the Nigerian Seamen's Union
Maritime labour and subaltern geographies of internationalism
The Mythical Musical Boatmen
A Tale of Two Cities
Les marins noirs dans la Royal Navy au XVIII siècle
Olaudah Equiano and the Sailor's Telegraph
Earthsickness
To Plead Our Own Cause
Moral Contagion
Will the Real Jack Tar Please Stand Up?
Embodying African Knowledge in Colonial Surinam
The Literary Presence of Atlantic Colonialism as Notation and Counterpoint
Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States
Up From Exclusion
Black West Indian Seamen in the British Merchant Marine in the Mid nineteenth Century
The Mutiny on the Hermione
Bread and Arsenic
The English Professors of Brazil
The Illusion of Isolation
Creating the Norm
From slave revolts to social death
The Mobilities of Ships and Shipped Mobilities
Race, Creole, and National Identities in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Phillips's Cambridge
Whenever They Judge it Expedient”
Atlantic networks, antagonisms and the formation of subaltern political identities
The relational turn in island geographies
Gold versus Life
Expressly Recognized by Our Election Laws
Whaling intelligence
Black Politics but Not Black People
Iron sails the seas
Juan Gallardo
Slave Revolt Across Borders
Marin et citoyen
The Seaman Feels Him-self a Man”
I Espied a Chinaman’
American Toussaints
Eighteenth Century ‘Prize Negroes’
Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, the Whalefishery, and Seafaring's Impact on Community Development
Sailors, states, and employers in the construction of masculine maritime identity
Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism
Nineteenth-Century Royal Navy Sailors from Africa and the African Diaspora
Masquerading Africa in the Carnival of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil 1895–1905
Sentiment and cosmopolitanism in Olaudah Equiano's Narrative
Anglo-worlds in transit
Zachary Reid’s Transoceanic Performance of White Gentility in Sea of Poppies
Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 (review)
Reconstructing Race and Freedom in Atlantic Modernity
The ship as assemblage
Arithmetic and Afro-Atlantic pastoral protest
The Cotton That Connects, the Cloth That Binds
Cuffe's Black Atlantic World, 1808–1817
Comfort and guidance for female passengers
Bahamian Ship Graffiti
The Atlantic as a vector of uneven and combined development
Make a Black Life, and Bid It Sing
Jeffrey Brace in Barbados
The Sensory Landscape of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Connecticut River Valley
Landscape legacies of the African diaspora in Brazil
Efficient, Efficacious and Humane Responses to Non-European Bodies in British Military Medicine, 1780–1815
The Narrative of Robert Adams, A Barbary Captive
That is How Whores Get Punished
Refuge Upon the Sea
The Sixth Zone
Enslaved Merchants, Enslaved Merchant-Mariners, and the Bermuda Conspiracy of 1761
Getting Away with Murder
History Below the Waterline
Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification
More desultory and unconnected than any other
The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa
Black People under the Black Flag
Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves
Rites and power
A Flag of Defyance at the Masthead
Mercantile Exchanges, Mercantilist Enclosures
Law, Settler Colonialism, and “the Forgotten Space” of Maritime Worlds
The Roots of Early Black Nationalism
An Eye for Prices, an Eye for Souls
Slavery, Sea Power and the State
Gorge
Capitalism's Captives
Mobility in Chains
Constructing Community
Anti-Slavery Cosmopolitanism in the Black Atlantic
Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713-1783
The Red Atlantic
Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers
White Slaves, African Masters
Different Slave Journeys
Counter-Insurgency, Subalternity and Spatial Relations
Spatial relations and the materialities of political conflict
Engineering Exile
Evangelical Networks in the Greater Caribbean and the Origins of the Black Church
Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions
Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean
Market Marronage
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |