Colonial America
Eliza Lucas Pinckney Gets the (Indigo) Blues
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) owned enslaved people, and it was her exploitation of their labor that made her achievements as an agricultural innovator possible. Eliza Lucas was born on Antigua, which was then part of the British Leeward Islands, where she grew up on one of…
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From the Archives: Independence Lost
I will admit it: it didn’t even occur to me until last week that the 250th anniversary of the United States was the perfect opportunity for a series of blog posts related to the American Revolution, the creation of the constitution, and like that. Or that I could have spent the last six months reading…
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From the Archives: A Word with a Past: Kidnap
In the mid-seventeenth century, the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean were suffering from a labor shortage. The colonies had originally attracted Britain’s surplus population: dreamers, fortune-hunters, religious nuts, younger sons, prisoners of war, political failures, vagrants, criminals, the homeless, and the desperate. Some came with a small financial stake. Many came as…
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