Author: Bobadilla, Rachel

Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age

Sylvia R. Frey, Author, with foreword by Manisha Sinha

Princeton University Press, 2025

 

Abstract:

black and white image of revolutionary figures struggling, with book title and author's name overlaid in contrasting white and yellow text

The American Revolution brought about violent and unpredictable social changes throughout the new nation, particularly in the South. Sylvia Frey reveals how slave resistance gave rise to a Black liberation movement that was central to the revolutionary struggle in the southern colonies, and how Black resistance persisted after the war as a struggle for cultural power that manifested itself in the establishment of separate Black churches with distinctive ritual patterns and moral values. She examines how white Southerners responded to Black resistance amid their own fight for independence from the British, and how they reacted to new movements by African Americans in the postwar period. With an incisive foreword by Manisha Sinha, Water from the Rock shows how the upheavals of war created opportunities for a quiet revolution that laid the foundations for the modern civil rights movement in America.

 

Fiona Vernal work supporting oral history in CT featured in UConn Today article

In collaboration with Connecticut Humanities and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, Fiona Vernal has made an online platform TheirStory accessible to CT organizations and residents to support the creation of oral history collections. Vernal began working with TheirStory creator Zack Ellis in 2022 working on a project on West Indian, African American, and Puerto Rican migrations to Hartford. The article also details the other CT organization and communities that have benefitted from this collaboration.

Ireland and the Renaissance court: Political culture from the cúirteanna to Whitehall, 1450-1640

Edited by David Edwards and Brendan Kane

Book Cover for Ireland and the Renaissance court

Manchester University Press, 2024

 

Description

Ireland and the Renaissance court is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring Irish and English courts, courtiers and politics in the early modern period, c. 1450-1650. Chapters are contributed by both established and emergent scholars working in the fields of history, literary studies, and philology. They focus on Gaelic cúirteanna, the indigenous centres of aristocratic life throughout the medieval period; on the regnal court of the emergent British empire based in London at Whitehall; and on Irish participation in the wider world of European elite life and letters. Collectively, they expand the chronological limits of ‘early modern’ Ireland to include the fifteenth century and recreate its multi-lingual character through exploration of its English, Irish and Latin archives. This volume is an innovative effort at moving beyond binary approaches to English-Irish history by demonstrating points of contact as well as contention.