The UNC Department of History presents

Around 1785 a woman called 'Rosalie of the Poulard nation' was taken captive in West Africa and deported to the French colony of Saint-Domingue. In her talk, Rebecca Scott will use the history of Rosalie and her descendants to explore the dynamics of enslavement and emancipation, and to understand some of the
varieties of rightlessness and rights-consciousness that emerged in the Atlantic world across the long nineteenth century. She will focus on the first three generations of the family-from Senegambia, Saint-Domingue, and Santiago (Cuba) to New Orleans and France- and will structure the story around the archival documents that have made it possible to reconstruct this itinerary, beginning with a letter written in 1899 by a cigar-maker in Antwerp to General Máximo Gómez, hero of the Cuban war of independence.

REBECCA J. SCOTT is the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Her fields of research are Latin American and Cuban history; the history of slavery and emancipation; and race, law, and citizenship in the United States. Her most recent book "Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery" appeared from Harvard University Press in 2005
and received the Frederick Douglass Prize and the John Hope Franklin Prize. Her recent articles include "Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge," Michigan Law Review 106 (March 2008); "The Atlantic World and the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson," in the Journal of American History (December 2007): and "Public Rights and Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole
Itinerary," Current Anthropology (April 2007).

Convened in cooperation with:
- the Institute for the Arts & Humanities,
- the Institute for the Studies of the Americas, and
- the Initiative for a Center and Program for
Transoceanic 18th- and 19th-Century Studies (CTOS)

Please click here for the flyer PDF.