bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

WHAT a memoir. I know everyone has already raved about McCurdy's book but it is so good. Listening to McCurdy narrate it, really elevated the experience. She does not hold anything back. Growing up watching Icarly and relating it back to her experiences behind the scenes is very sobering. All the women in McCurdy's life failed her, and all the people who were supposed to protect and care for her used her for their own means. As Jennette weaves through her life, readers can see how the dysfunction grew upon itself manifesting in her life in different ways. This narrative could be very triggering for some people so be warned

Holger Hoock makes it clear that he does not have a stake in American history (as he is a german man). He has a fresh outlook on American history because he did not grow up with nationalistic American myths. Hoock wants to shed light on the shared anglo-history and myths on both the US and British sides. He wants to write violence back into the story of the American revolution so that readers can really understand it. Violence is his central analytical and narrative focus. Experiences of violence came in many forms - physical, emotional, and intellectual. For political and military violence he only focuses on key dynamic points in history. Hoock's narrative is looking at all sides of the war - Colonists, Loyalists, Indigenous, and Black.

Death rate statistics are shocking (if I remember correctly is one of THE most violent wars that the USA participated in.) By understanding how violence relates to nation-building is critical to understanding the creation of America. Children were picking up skeletal parts up until the 1840s in certain areas in the US. After the war, vets were used to showing the cruelty of the British - helping perpetuate the narrative that the British were solely evil. War showed that propaganda worked well. Facing the truth that both sides were equally evil and violent to each other will allow for frank reflection on America's birth. Hoock also says racial injustice is set in the founding of America, as does Robert G. Parkinson. The American Revolution gave the US a blueprint on how to suppress violence in America and how to treat Indigenous people and their land.

Towards Zero and Ordeal by Innocence were crazy reads. I enjoyed listening to them on audiobook. The narrators for each of the stories did a great job. Agatha Christie always manages to keep me guessing until the last second.

Thirteen Clocks is an off-shoot of Parkinson's other book The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. He's just focusing on how race was weaponized to unite the colonies and help hammer home in the colonists' minds that the British were treacherous enemies. Parkinson is exploring the contingent story of how that sense of exclusion (of Black and Native people) occurred at the birth of the USA. The main theme of the book is contingency. Parkinson says that focusing on the opening paragraphs of the declaration of independence leaves readers with an incomplete picture of its meaning. He also stresses that the beginning of the USA and the revolution is very complex for one historian alone to fully grasp.

Through reading Thirteen Clocks it's clear to see the propaganda and stories created guided policy during the Revolutionary war. The stories did not go away after 1776. Proxy stories foreclosed the alternatives after the war was over and these stories mattered because the republic was based on citizenship. Many historians underestimate how Black and Indigenous people were on the minds of the Founding Fathers right at independence. The Founding Fathers weaponized the idea of race, and created a nation where people who were free and white deserved to be the only citizens.

The work Vincent Brown does with Tacky's Revolt is a LOT. Tacky's revolt combined itineraries of many people who were all engaged in life-and-death struggles to accumulate wealth, power, freedom or survival. Brown's main point is enslavement was a constant low-intensity war and revolt was just open warfare. It is about shifting warfare from beyond a western lens. War was a principal conduit and facilitator of Atlantic commerce. Tacky's Revolt was derived from an entanglement of empire trade and war across the Atlantic, and a small part in the larger series of slave wars. Generally in Western history war is treated as an interruption while slave war was truly never-ending.

Vincent Brown covers so many skirmishes and major fights from 1760-1761, that it is really hard to wrap your head around it. He has a website where you can follow along as it is a multi-layered interactive map. It follows along a timeline and you can chart each group's movements (the formerly enslaved, the maroons, the navy, the militia)

Brown starts off in Africa (the Gold Coast), setting the stage for readers to understand that many enslaved people already have experience with European expansion and a lot of African men who came over to Jamaica in the 18th century had military experience. He says Jamaica was militarized society with a tense symbiosis of war and business, and that slavery encouraged it to be as such."The seeds of insurrection surely germinated in Africa, but they sprouted in the fertile soil of American slavery's brutal violence. And they flowered in the light of imperial warfare..."

From there, the readers go to Jamaica and the groundwork is laid for Tacky's Revolt, Tacky's Revolt and the Coromantee War is covered. Brown says the Coromantee War is an extension of the African conflicts that fed the slave trade. While insurrections such as Tacky's revolt were suppressed they resounded culturally in meaning, narration, and memory. Older Jamaicans would tell newly arrived people about old revolts. Black people in the age of revolution drew from their historical political landscape to navigate the Atlantic World.

"You turn Negroe out of the Path now but soon Negroe will turn you out" - Montezuma (enslaved man, property holder, Jamaica 1792)

Brown ends his narrative with this - "As long as enslaved Africans and their descendants continued to fight, they would never be defeated."

Davidson Hepburn writes a memoir that is funny and inspiring. He showcases his pretty incredible life; he went all over the place - studying in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. He served The Bahamas government in many ways as an ambassador, working with the United Nations, among many other things. I wish he would have expanded on his experiences more in different eras of his life. He seems to hit each life marker, mention a few details, and move on. I wanted to know what it was like to experience racism in Florida in the 1960s or his experiences with being Black in Europe. He touches on those things but never goes into detail. I would have also liked a more streamlined narrative. Hepburn bounces from topic to topic sometimes out of order of his life trajectory. I picked up this work sporadically so perhaps that caused it to feel more disjointed. 

I wish he would have expanded more on his early life on Cat Island. I've noticed that none of the older Bahamian people I meet ever talk about what it was like growing up on the family island. Hepburn remarks that when he was younger he was ashamed of the 'lack' his family had. My own father who is much younger than Hepburn can recall his time growing up in South Andros with no electricity or running water with some fondness (and he grew up there in the 1970s). 

Rebecca's Revival shows readers what an author can do on a subject with limited primary source material. Rebecca Protten is an enslaved mulatto girl born and Antigua, who is later kidnapped and taken to the island of St. Thomas. Jon Senesbach creates a narrative around Rebecca which shows the complexities of St. Thomas between the Dutch planters and the enslaved Africans and Creoles. Rebecca is used to highlight the Moravian missionaries who came and went from St. Thomas, and how their efforts largely depended upon people of colour, such as Rebecca to keep the conversion of enslaved going forward.

Rebecca becomes ordained in the Moravian way and participates in one first black congregations in the Americas. I went to a talk which was centered on religion and enslavement in the Caribbean, and one of the speakers talked about the rapid conversions of enslaved people in St. Thomas. The speaker called it the Black Acts Church (or something like that). It is shocking to hear and read, both in that talk and in this book what converts and the missionaries were willing to go through to exercise their religion. The Dutch planters were firmly against their enslaved people being educated in religion, and they barely tolerated the missionaries who kept coming to St. Thomas. Fear of another slave revolt such as the one in 1733 on St. John kept the planters very paranoid.

Due to the fragmented source material Senesbach can only guess at or suppose at some aspects of Rebecca's life, as she personally did not leave much-written material behind despite being literate. I was disappointed about the latter half of the book, not because of research or writing but because of the trajectory of Rebecca's life. She was imprisoned, one husband dies, she moves to Africa and evangelizes there (there's very little source material about her life there), she moves to Germany and another husband dies, her child dies, and she stays in Germany instead of going back to St. Thomas and dies there at an old age. I wish her life could have been happier, but most missionary narratives I've read have proved to be very contentious and dismal. Rebecca's Revival is a great microhistory that sheds light on the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world.

ps. Sensbach is my advisor in grad school and a very knowledgeable person!

Tinker does a good job of linking Nassau during this particular era of Blockade running in the American Civil War. There's a lot of background leading up to the actual section which highlights Blockade running in Nassau. Tinker basically takes the reader from the American Revolution to the Civil War with The Bahamas in context. He gives historical background on The Bahamas and Nassau prior to the Blockacade; I'd say over half the book is strictly context. I would have liked a little bit more in-depth look into the actual perspectives on the blockade running, and more diversity within those views.