The Business of Slavery - Two Princes of Calabar

Like The Diligent, Sparks’ Two Princes of Calabar sheds new light on the familiar topic of African slavery – at least, a topic I thought was familiar until I read these two books. My previous understanding of slavery was entirely based on what I had read about the experience of slaves, slaveholders, and abolitionists in America, primarily in the 19th century. These books take the reader into the roots of slavery, forming a whole new understanding.

One of the things that struck me most about Two Princes was the way that Sparks’ focus on the intricate business aspects almost obscures the abject horror that permeated the entire business. There were points in the book when, after several pages of examination of the profits, negotiations, and wealth-building involved, Sparks almost had to remind the reader that the entire foundation of these financial transactions was a system that routinely destroyed lives and families. The experience of being shocked back into that recognition after focusing on the practical aspects of slavery gave me another insight: a slight, fleeting understanding of how the British traders, ship owners, and others who facilitated the system without getting their hands dirty could exist in a state of denial, focusing on the business at hand without having to witness the shocking reality of slavery’s human impact.

Slavery, Creolization, and the New Princes

Randy Sparks in The Two Princes of Calabar uses the story of two 'Creoles' from West Africa to weave together a picture of the Atlantic Slave Trade. I found this work helpful in my grappling with the realities of slavery. When exploring the complexities of slavery it can be easy to fall into traps that undermine conventional narratives. But undermining conventional slave trade stories is exactly what the experience of the Robin John's is meant to do. The Robin John's were very much apart of the new class of princes that supplied and were supplied by European ships conducting the slave trade when they fell victim to it. Sparks argues that they were knowledgeable of the Europeans and the nature of that trade in general; they used this to eventually secure there freedom and return home. This plays into the themes we've seen regarding African agency involving the slave trade, but also expands on it to include agency beyond African shores. This is something I found both interesting and perplexing. For one it opens up questions of how African concepts of slavery and status could reach the New World and highlights how not all slaves were equal. On page 85 Sparks quotes Ira Berlin who said, "if slavery meant abuse and degradation, the experience of Atlantic creoles provided strategies for limiting such maltreatment." The problem with this is that it highlights conditions that lead me to question the choice to highlight the agency of such persons because it undermines the power and importance  that Europeans had over the process. The Robin Johns were able to avoid plantation labor and return home because they could draw upon their knowledge and acculturation to make themselves useful to masters in the colonies. Do historians risk euphemizing slavery by drawing to many conclusions from the creole experience? Or is it important to do so in order to explore Atlantic slavery beyond conventional notions?    

Two Princes

The Two Princes of Calabar tells the story of two "princes" who were abducted from their African slave-trading family and sold in to slavery several times. Their adventure is an unbelievable story of privilege, abduction, bondage, escape, and jurisprudence told across the Atlantic Ocean and three continents. The book is based on their letters, and in that way is similar to my microhistory based on a former slave's memoir.

In the beginning, Sparks clearly shows how European intervention changed African society, particularly for the Efik traders and the leaders of New Town and Old Town. The slave trade expanded to such a grand size, once Europeans got involved, that the culture changed from small household groups to a system of centralized power under a "king." The king being the head of the family that accumulated the most wealth and power with the European traders.

The book explores the diplomacy and rules between the Europeans and the Africans. Those networks reached far. Not just on the ships and canoes near Old Town. They reached into the English court system. As with The Diligent, this book uses the brothers story to tell a larger story of a complex, dynamic system.

Where in the world are the Robin Johns?

I want to start with saying that I really enjoyed The Two Prices of Calabar, Sparks does an admirable job in creating an overview of the Atlantic Slave Trade on a microhistory level. Sparks is clear about his intentions "I explore the impact of the rise of the Atlantic World on a particular place in time - eighteenth-century Old Calabar." (3) I feel like I understand the politics and mercantile beginnings of Old Calabar, the position of creolized Africans in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the laws that governed England in the eighteenth century with regard to slavery after reading the book.

At the end of the book I must say that I was left feeling a little disappointed because in the Preface of the book Sparks says that he used a "firsthand account of an Atlantic slave experience" (1) but, at the end I was left wondering where are the Robin Johns? The book gave me a lot of information but I felt like the information that I really wanted wasn't there. In thinking back to Martha Ballard and comparing her to the Robin Johns I feel like Sparks could have given me such a better picture in my mind of the Robin Johns, and I can't help but think that this was a missed opportunity. Ullrich was able to concentrate on the information that she was trying to portray in The Midwife's Tale, at the same time she gives the reader an intimate view of the protagonist, whereas Sparks seems to lose his protagonists in the application of history.

While I believe he does give me the lens through which I can see the Atlantic slave trade, I just wish I knew more about the Robin Johns or Robin Robin Johns. I was also interested in the Robin Johns interest and commitment to the church. What a fascinating piece of history to discover their relationship with the Wesley's during their time in England.

 As a side note, if these guys didn't have bad luck they would have no luck!!

The Two Princes of Calabar

I think the primary point of The Two Princes of Calabar is to provide us with a lens through which to view the complex systems of trade and slavery in Africa and the vital interpersonal mercantile relationships between Europeans and Africans.  The impact of trade on African economies and societies is clearly visible, and the reader can see the new African mercantile elites who emerged to challenge, then surpass, the traditional (old) leaders.  Although the title suggests that Randy Sparks’s book will be about the Robin John brothers, in actuality the work is not exclusively about the lives of the two brothers.  Sparks does a great job of using the Robin Johns letters as raw material for a study of the creolized Atlantic World.  The author writes in the Prologue: “their story can provide a micro-history of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic World.” (p.3)  Again Sparks re-asserts his main point by writing “their case opens a window onto the creolized trading communities along the coast and the regular movement of goods, people, and ideas around the Atlantic World.” (p.9)  Sparks masterfully illuminates the web of connections around the brother’s experiences by using their letters as a jumping off point, and rounding out the work with other primary sources.  The concept of Atlantic creolization is the result of the interactions between cultures, languages, practices, of three continents.  The adoption and adaptation of British culture and language by Africans was especially important to trade relationships, and the Robin Johns were able to use this knowledge to ameliorate their situation, a point acknowledged by Sparks:   “that knowledge, combined with their understanding of English language and customs, must have enabled them to negotiate their enslavement in ways that other captives could not.” (P.73)  All in all, I really liked this book, although I would caution readers to remember (as Sparks did) that the experiences of the Robin John brothers on their “Atlantic Odyssey” is not in any way typical, maybe not even emblematic, of the experiences had by the overwhelming majority of captive Africans who were enslaved and traded as chattel, victims of the Atlantic slave trade.  The exceptional experience the two brothers shared gives us a great look at the impact of slave trade economics on African cultures and societies and their European (and American) trading partners. 

Creolization and Slavery

Creolization is something that I've never actually considered before. I always figured that it was something that existed naturally, not something that had to be developed or fostered in any way. The mixture of the European culture with the African culture is something that we see happening even today, so it's fascinating to look at some of where it originated, and I enjoyed, for the most part, the way that it was written.

As much as I did enjoy it, I'm not sure that I agree with Sparks on some of his points, especially the ones about slaves. From what I understand from Sparks' writing, he claims that  slaves were not technically slaves because they had never done anything to forfeit their liberty in the first place, which not only didn't really make sense to me, but seemed like a simplistic way of thinking about the nature of slavery, the same way that a seventh grader would rationalize slavery by saying that they knew what they were doing. Saying that they didn't forfeit their liberty in the first place - well, of course they didn't! Other people did it for them by capturing and enslaving them. I could hardly make sense of this point, because the entire point of slavery is that it's without the slave's consent. I'm aware that he was trying to make an argument within the larger spectrum of the book - to try to get us to see that there was a larger diversity in enslaved peoples than is usually thought, but I didn't enjoy how he put it.

Mrs. Jennie Louise Van Durzee Welcome

Despite the pervading idea that women, especially women of color, sat around and waited for the men to make history, women were actually vibrant participants in their own culture and in their own lives. In the case of Mrs. Jennie Louise Van Durzee Welcome, who seems like the sort of woman you refer to as Mrs, no matter what, she played many roles within the changing society. As an intermittent entertainer, teacher, activist, and documentary filmmaker, Mrs. Welcome shows up in a variety of sources, but most of the primary sources are society pages that document Mrs. Welcome's appearances at various social gatherings, usually Who's Who In Colored America, where she made several appearances over the course of her long, colorful life.

According to a post about Welcome advertising her teaching prowess, and based on that advertisement alone, Welcome had skill enough in art, music, piano, photography, painting, and the real estate business to teach them to students. This is an incredibly wide net, showing that she was remarkably educated and capable not only in traditional artistic pursuits, but in new ones like Photography. She also must have had an excellent head for numbers and good intrapersonal skills, which would have aided her abilities to sell.


In regard to secondary sources, Mrs. Welcome generally appears with her husband, Ernest Toussiant Welcome, as they do in The Documentary Film Reader and Struggles For Representation. Both books discuss their dedication to making sure that black soldier's contributions to the World War I efforts were seen, as they made "Doing Their Bit", which was a 12 part documentary which focused on "the military and economic role played by all races in the War Of Nations both 'Over Here' and 'Over There.'" Their pushback to this systematic erasure of people of color by using a new medium - they were filming in only 1916- suggests a woman who is unafraid of change or danger. The bit of "Doing Their Bit" that could be found on Youtube shows a silent, black and white film that is literally right up close and personal with the soldiers, suggesting that Welcome herself was probably right by the battlefield, at what was probably incredible personal risk. The pair of them also created a lithograph that showed black soldiers not only on the battlefield, but at home as well, introducing viewers to their families and showing that they were not only fierce heros, but people too. This attempt to humanize black people, who were either demonized or oversexualized, is

For me, there is a lot that I'm going to have to assume about Mrs. Welcome, because while there are things that she made herself, there isn't anything that she wrote about her own life. So what I'm looking to do is to compare her life to the average woman's at her time period.

An ‘Odyssey’ or Incident of Slavery?

So right out of the gate I have a question, what was the focus of Randy Spark’s work? Fairly straightforward in the introduction and description, I quickly realized that I don’t think the Robin Johns were the focus of this work. They are briefly alluded to in the first half of the book and it isn’t until nearly 2/3rds of the way in (on page 84) that any part of what they experienced is noted, cited, and quoted. So I wonder then, what was Sparks trying to convey if not an accurate representation of a brothers odyssey? Beyond the intent of the work, which I find to be an illustration of how these cultures of (England and Africa) engaged one another, the legality and perceptions of slavery, and the greater slave culture, the focus differs from what Sparks claims it does.

I think this work was about several different things, some more than others. I think that the massacre and its relation to African and British relations/culture was the main focus of The Two Princes of Calabar. The massacre is brought up again and again and it the single most detailed account of the work. In fact, the amount of description giving to the Robin Johns experience is barely any more elaborated on in the main work as compared with the brief description allotted in the introduction. The massacre, however, is given nearly three times as much analysis, including the detailed recreation through Spark’s own research.

I believe that Sparks found an interesting source, the letters of the Robin Johns, and used that as a platform to launch an investigation into Old Calabar, British/African (Efik to be exact) relations, culture, and legal systems, as well as their respective religious integrations. It appears to me that either Sparks started off with some knowledge beforehand and utilized the letters as a tool to thread together his notions OR simply used the letters as a starting point that splintered into varying scholarships.  He cites the letters when necessary in his endnotes, however nearly the entire book is based off of other primary/secondary works.

Spark also has this tendency to waver with a sort of selective contextualization.  At times being (appropriately so) hyper specific with his analysis and making claims only of the Robin Johns, Old Calbar (New Town and Old Town) and specific English authorities. However, then he tends to make these broad sweeping claims that sweep up the entire Atlantic world without proper foundation. The first example is when talking about the exchange of culture (or rather cultural imperialism) between England and ‘Africa’. He tends to lose sight of the context of Old Calabar and make general claims encompassing all of Africa and all of the slave trade. It also tends to make the English seem like larger actors in the African slave trade by making such large analysis based off of the Old Calbar region alone. (p. 33) In addition, he makes the age old mistake of uniting all of Africa under one monolithic culture, one necessary in order to make large assertions. On page 132 he quotes “Still, ‘it seems clear that African thinking on the slave trade closely paralleled that of contemporary (pre-abolitionist) Europe”. I find this section to be somewhat convoluted. It seems as if he is citing an unpublished paper by Robin Law on West African Slave trade. This seems like a correctly utilized source, however he starts quoting in ways and talking in ways that begin to remove oneself from the mindset of Western Africa. Sparks begins talking about Africa as a singular culture and singular line of thinking. Most likely this was done to give gravitas to his conclusions, yet seemingly detracts from his analysis.

A Creolized Atlantic World

To begin, I though Randy Sparks’s The Two Princes of Calabar was a great book. In particular, I found his argument of the creolization of the Atlantic world very intriguing. I also thought, Sparks successfully demonstrated the creolization of the Robin Johns and other Old and New Calabar merchant elite. I, however, am curious about the degree to which the creole culture influenced English merchants and other European slave traders. As Sparks’s book stands, I’m not sure that it did. To be clear, I think such an argument was outside the bounds of his study, which meant to demonstrate that the Robin Johns were a product of the creolized culture that allowed them to successfully navigate socio-political landscapes in which they found themselves enslaved. Nevertheless, I wonder to what degree this creolization process was mutually influential, or was the hybridized culture adopted only by the elites of Calabar—a sort of soft imposition by Europeans? There does seem to be some English adoption of Efik ideas and discourse. For instance, the English seem to have shared the legal justification for slavery as a product of war booty (if not necessarily followed in practice by the Europeans) that the Robin Johns could utilize in their legal arguments (101-102). The answer to this question is clearly outside the bounds of Sparks’s book, but he opens up an intriguing debate of the degree of a common Atlantic creole culture. The parties who made the rules of that culture (and perhaps 'rules' is too strong a term) might be irrelevant to the more fascinating issue of its existence and how it worked culturally and logistically.

Arguing Efik Law in England

        I found the most convincing and interesting part of the Two Princes of Calabar to be the part about the way in which the Robin Johns argued that they had never been slaves in the first place since they had "not done anything to forfeit [their] liberty" (101).  I felt like this really drove home one of the arguments that Sparks was making, which was to show the reader that there was a great deal of ethnic diversity among enslaved Africans.  While I had some difficulty buying into Sparks's arguments as to why the Robin Johns chose to adopt Christianity I felt like this book really accomplished one of the goals that it set out to do.  As Sparks says in the beginning of the book, it's often difficult to get a grasp on the slave trade when one is reading about it in terms of the number of people moved from place to place.  Also, I liked how he set the Robin Johns' story in terms of their impact on the slave trade in England, and in so doing shifted the focus away from their role just as men who brought missionaries to Africa.  While there were at times in the book where it seemed like the focus moved away from the brothers' story, the way Sparks connected their story to the abolition of the slave trade was, in my opinion, a great example of what a microhistory can accomplish.  Finally, I especially liked the part about Williamsburg, since that is where I'm from.

The Two Princes of Calabar & The Diligent, Considered Together (Weekly Blog)

Reading the two slave books back-to-back was instructive in considering how they were constructed as microhistories.

I much preferred The Diligent.  It was by far the more informative of the two books, and in spite of being lengthier than The Two Princes, it seemed more cohesive in following the ship's voyage than The Two Princes did in following the story of the abducted men.  This was surprising to me because The Two Princes promised to be the better story.  The Diligent did this by making its supporting material more relevant and interesting than that of The Two Princes, a circumstance that would appear to be a very important lesson in how to construct a microhistory.  In other words, just telling your micro-story isn't enough.  You must relate it and connect it to the larger story in a way that enhances the micro-story.

I also want to mention that I thought Randy J. Sparks over-hyped The Two Princes in a way that detracted from the story, perhaps another lesson for microhistory writers.  He titled his book and his characters as "princes," then said that it was the English who called them princes rather than the Africans, and continued to refer to them as princes without substantiating (as far as I could tell) the references by the English.  At any rate, they weren't princes and I felt that it detracted from the book.  Further, Sparks stated in his Prologue that "the evidence indicates that they also went back to their old business as slave traders" (my emphasis, p. 9).  I think this was a tremendously important point for the reader, one which should cause a closer examination of the experience of these men and the impact of the clashing cultures in which they moved.  But it turns out that there was only one reference to this "evidence," a letter from one, not both, of the men, and in his note on the source Sparks admitted that "given the repetition of names among the Robin Johns, attribution is difficult" (p. 178).   

A Fascinating Life

The topic of my microhistory is an enslaved American named Boston King. Boston's father was born in Africa, survived the middle passage, and had a family in South Carolina. King ran away from his "master" during the American Revolution and joined the British. He was a part of group of former slaves who took refuge in New York following the war. They were later relocated to Nova Scotia by the British where he became a Methodist preacher. He later moved with his family to Sierra Leone, returning to his father's Africa to bring Christianity to the people.

King wrote a memoir, which was published in 1789. I have found his memoir in an anthology called Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, as well as an annotated version published by the Antislavery Literature Project at Arizona State University. I have an article called "Arming the Slaves in the American Revolution" and an article called "Our Mad Methodists: Abolitionism, Methodism and Missions in Sierra Leone in the Late Eighteenth Century." To research his life in Nova Scotia I hope to pull information from The Black Loyalist Heritage Foundation website in Nova Scotia.

I first came across Boston King in a book by Simon Schama called Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution. This book has a much larger scale than just the life of King, but it provides information about the British use of American slaves and the frustration they felt when they weren't able to emancipate all the slaves who helped them. (The new American government considered the return of the slaves a necessary war reparation.)

This topic is similar to The Diligent because of its subject matter and because it was written by a first-person participant in the events. King's story is not a diary like A Midwife's Tale, nor is it a journal like Robert Durand's log on the Diligent. King's story is a reflection of his life written in his old age. He is weak on dates, and runs through his life events rather manner-of-fact-ly. My other sources should help me fill out the story. I think I shall have to use the would "perhaps" to make him more personable. He speaks most passionately when he tells of his religious conversion. It was the most important event in his life, but his life follows a journey through some incredible history! I want to follow King's life through those events. I don't want to use him as a connecting thread through some greater story. I want to tell the fascinating story of one man's exceptional life.

I worry about telling a narrative, based on a memoir, that is not redundant or boring. I would like his story to flow and only interrupt it to provide context. I'd like to just footnote my sources other than his memoir but I'm not sure if that is okay. Otherwise everything would just be one big footnote? That's the confusing part for me.

Saving the Declaration of Independence

   Thirty years after the end of the American Revolution, the United States was entangled in another war with the British.  In the late summer and early fall of 1814, Washington, DC was under siege.  James Monroe, the Secretary of State, ordered that a clerk, Stephen Pleasonton, take three monumentally significant documents out of the State Department and usher them to safety.  The plan was originally to store the documents at a mill on the Potomac River near Georgetown, but Mr Pleasonton transported the documents to instead to Rokeby, a home located in Leesburg, Virginia, which was 35 miles away from the danger lurking in the burning city of Washington.  It is in the vault at Rokeby where the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Articles of Confederation were kept safe during the attack on Washington.  From my research, it appears this was the only time those documents were ever stored in a private residence.  My project will examine the journey the documents took, and the actors, including, but not limited to: Stephen Pleasonton, James Monroe, Reverend John Littlejohn, Charles Binns III, Catesby Cocke, Charles Binns II, The Binns Family, Rokeby House, and many others.  I will examine why Pleasonton decided not to use the mill in Georgetown, and who helped him broker the deal to store the documents at Rokeby.  There was a clear sense of the importance of the documents which were “saved,” and I will examine the idea that perhaps these documents indeed conveyed some talismanic importance: to this day, some people in and around the Town of Leesburg claim that while the documents were in Leesburg the town would have been considered as the nation’s capital.

   So far, I have encountered a variety of sources while researching this event – articles, deeds, wills, and some really cool old books.  What follows are some titles I have consulted while attempting to document this story:  The Virginia Historical Chronicle, Virginia Historical Magazine, Guide to the Buildings of Surry and The American Revolution, William & Mary Quarterly, Robert Morgan Moxham, Belmont Plantation on the Occoquan, (1975), James C. Southhall, The Cocke Family of Virginia, (1897), Deeds and Wills 1738 – 1754 and 1754 – 1768 Surry County Courthouse (copy on loan to Loudoun Co. Rust Library), Frederick Gutheim, The Potomac, (1949), The Constitution of the United States, Together With An Account of its Travels Since September 1787, compiled by David C. Mearns and Vernon W. Clapp.  (The Library of Congress, Washington: 1952 LCI.2 C76 (4) 952), Robert James Belford, A History of the United States in Chronological Order From A.D. 432 To The Present Time, (1886), A Sketch of the Events Which Preceded the Capture of Washington by the British on the Twenty-Fourth of August 1814, E.D. Ingraham, 1849.  NARA E 355.6 15 19 JE 366, J-122.

The Research of Rev. Dr. John Philip

I have chosen to center my microhistory on the work of abolitionist Wesleyan missionary Dr. John Philip who travelled to the Cape of Good Hope in 1818 to investigate the attempts to close a mission run by the London Missionary Society. His five years spent in the Cape coincided with the arrival of thousands of British settlers and merchants, and with rising public outcry over the practice of slavery in the British colonies. His observations along with a general survey of missionary efforts in Cape Town and the surrounding countryside were published in 1828 under the title Researches in South Africa. Excerpts from the survey quickly disseminated throughout the Anglo-phone abolitionist press, which is how I first came across the source. The newspaper articles describe it as an account meant to change public perception of the situation in the Cape, where the practice of slavery was considered to be 'mild' in form. Philip emphasizes the horrors of slavery and its detrimental effects upon slaves as well as masters. What makes the source valuable to me is what it reveals about the shifting power relationships at the Cape with the new British government seeking to establish itself among Dutch burghers and boors who are less enthusiastic about the 'ameliorative' reforms sought by humanitarian missionaries. The missionaries were at constant odds with the government over policies regarding native relations; this was especially true when issues relating to slaves and masters became embroiled in larger debates over education and civilization. Philip believed that missionaries provided the kind of spiritual and cultural education that both the 'coloured' people and aborigines required to find success in the expanding economy. Philip's account is filled with stories that are both shocking and enlightening that were meant to draw attention to the plight of the marginalized populations of the Cape. His efforts were partly successful for in 1828 the colonial government assured Khoisan people in Cape Town the same rights as indentured servants, yet enslaved persons remained the property of their masters. His accounts of settler conflict with the 'Bushmen' precluded the expanding war against the native South Africans on the frontier, but also illuminates the complexity of the relationships between various native peoples in their struggle to find solidarity. Naturally the missionary proposes religion as a unifying factor. The source provides as much valuable insight into the mentality of these reformers as it does of the conflicting interests in the colony.  

Although Philip's account is certainly valuable and will center my microhistory it is not the only source I plan on using. I found it infinitely helpful to use other sources to help flesh out some of the events alluded to by Philip. These include other abolitionist writings on the Cape Colony, including the New York published Freedom's Journal which ran a series titled, "On the Demoralizing Influence of Slavery," in 1828 that touched on many of the same themes as Philip. One particular event got my attention. Appearing in the abolitionist press and reported on by the London Times, JWL Gebhard, son of Rev. Gebhard, was executed in Cape Town on the November of 1822. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a slave, his father's property, by excessive punishment. The articles in the Times are vaguely sympathetic and much attention is given to the piety the offender as he faces the noose. Strangely enough Dr. Philip is reported to have given spiritual guidance to Gebhard and even rode with him from his place of confinement to the gallows. This intrigued me for several reasons. The first of which is that it seemed rather odd that Dr. Philip would have place himself so close to the condemned since this was a high profile slaves vs. masters trial, and was considered controversial enough to warrant reporting in London. Apparently the Dutch considered the trial a farce meant to sacrifice one of their own to the abolitionist cause, and yet in the abolitionist press the affair is painted as an attempt to prolong Cape Slavery by making it legally just. The reactions of the slaves in attendance are reported as solemn and lacking exultation. This event and the manner in which it was recorded is full of references to the larger politics of change at the Cape during this period.

A major challenge that I have been wrestling with is how ought we treat our sources as we construct a microhistory narrative? Some authors such as Ladurie and Ulrich are very interested in presenting the sources they use as products of a unique context. Others like the Cooks and Thornton stick fairly close what their sources give them, but do not necessarily interrogate them as much. This problem is especially difficult to overcome in the case of Philip's researches because it was meant to be consumed by a mass audience at home, so certain episodes feel like they've been portrayed to evoke a desired response. One such episode is when Philip and fellow missionaries are out in the country side preaching among the 'Caffires' and they report that they have no knowledge of the Christian religion at all. I find this hard to believe as missionaries had been active in these parts for decades before. Did Philip want it to appear that his party was the first among these natives? And that it was himself who had brought peace among the frontier natives alone? Missionaries of the period were certainly not above embellishment. In fact, daily life at the missionaries was presented in the most favorable of terms despite the fact that these missions were built and supported largely by unpaid African labor. How much should a microhistory narrative attempt to reveal these silences or stick to the what the source tells and understand it on its own terms?   
       

The Arrest of Osip Mandelstam

        So far I have been looking into two primary sources.  The first is the memoir of Nadezhda Mandelstam, entitled Hope Against Hope.  Nadezhda was the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam until Osip died in a corrective labor camp in the Soviet Union.  The second set of primary sources are printed in a book called The Mandelstam and "Der Nister" Files.  In this book are printed copies of 16 documents (with translations on the following pages) concerning Mandelstam's arrest, including a coupon for his arrest warrant, fingerprint forms, his death certificate, and a letter that Nadezhda wrote to the GULAG camp administration requesting an official death certificate for her husband after she learned of his death.
        Osip was originally arrested in 1934 for a poem that he wrote about Stalin.  Interestingly, the arrest warrants make no mention of this poem, but only say that Osip was arrested for "counterrevolutionary activity" under Article 58, a notorious law that was used to justify the arrests of countless political prisoners.  Nadezhda wrote the poem from memory in her memoir many years later, as there was no physical copy left of the poem at the time Nadezhda wrote it.  I've typed up the poem below in case anyone's interested in reading an example of what could get you sent to a Gulag camp in the Soviet Union, where there would be a good chance of death.
       Nadezhda's memoir is 400 pages long, and I'm still finishing working my way through it.  There are a number of different ways that I could approach the paper.  I will need to keep in mind that I will be trying to tell a story, by looking through this lens, about  a larger outside world.  I was thinking about writing my paper on just Osip's first arrest, which Nadezhda describes in great detail in her memoir, during which secret police officials stormed their house at night and tore it apart in search for the poem.  I think that Nadezhda's account of this event drives home the terror to which anyone was susceptible.  However, I'm not sure how much I will be able to get out of this event alone, so I may need to broaden my field of vision when approaching the paper.  Nonetheless, I'm having a great time so far with the research and am looking forward to continuing my progress.  



 We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

But where there's so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders-
fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete*

*(According to a footnote in the memoir, "There were persistent stories that Stalin had Ossetian blood.  Ossetia is to the north of Georgia in the Caucasus.  The people, of Iranian stock, are quite different from the Georgians)

Tragedy at Nyamata Church

The Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994 and only lasted for one hundred days but it left an indelible mark on the country. There are well known stories such as the one portrayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda where the manager of the hotel who was a Hutu and his Tutsi wife protected a large group of people from certain death. There are many other stories about the genocide in Rwanda that have a more sinister outcome, and I have chosen to tell the story of the Nyamata church and its leader.

The Nyamata church is located in Bugesera which is in the southern part of Rwanda. When the violence began many people who were parishioners of that church fled their homes and sought shelter in the church. The pastor of the church was Jean-Bosco Uwinkindi, he was a Hutu and had led the Pentecostal Church for many years. During the genocide that occurred there Uwinkindi, instead of acting as the protector of his flock, turned his parishioners and led a killing spree of the people hiding in the Church.

It is my intention to show how this small church located in the countryside can be used as lens to see the violence and betrayal that the Tutsi people endured all over the country. While there are some stories of those who were taken in and protected the vast majority of people turned on one another even if they had been friends and colleagues just days before.

I am using the court documents and testimonies from Uwinkindi's indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the oral histories that the United Nations has collected from people that escaped death at the Nyamata Church as my primary sources. There are over 500 documents attached to the case. Uwinkindi was not tried at the Hague but was instead tried in Rwanda.Uwinkindi was not caught until 2012 and was not sentenced in Rwanda to a life term until 2015, twenty-one years after his crimes were committed. The story of the Rwandan governments eventual trial of Uwinkindi is a lesson in perseverance and patience to see those who wrecked havoc in the country brought to justice.

The one thing that I ran into was that because the indictment was originally brought by the International Criminal Tribunal some of the court documents are in French and my rudimentary French makes that a little hard to read but I've been plowing through them. Luckily, the actual victim testimonies in the indictment were translated from the speakers original language Kinyarwanda to French and then to English because the original judicial panel included both French and English judges. At times I also find myself needing to put the testimonies down and walk away just to get a break from the devastation.

A Frenchman in Constantinople: The Embassy of Jacques de Germigny (1578-1584)

My paper follows the experience of Jacques de Germigny, the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1578 to 1584, in Constantinople. Until recently diplomats have been studied as windows of foreign policy and the motivations of their sovereigns. Only recently have historians (such as Daniel Goffman, and Eric Dursteler) started to investigate the experience of European ambassadors in the Ottoman Empire. Both Goffman and Dursteler, for instance, focus on the English factors and the Venetian subjects as a whole in Ottoman lands during the early modern period. My microhistory will focus just on the embassy of Jacques de Germigny. I hope to illuminate the individuals he interacted with the most, the conditions under which he did so, the factions with which he sought to align himself—in other words, the degree to which and how he inserted himself into the Ottoman political world.

My project has much in common with the Cooks’ Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance primarily because of the source base. Certainly the Cooks’ sources were court records, and my sources are diplomatic correspondence, but in many ways they are similar. In both, the witness or ambassador is interacting with an authority figure who has significant control on the outcome of his/her situation, making the information they provide biased in that it is self-interested. Also, similar to the Cooks’ sources, mine are voluminous. I’m using three manuscript collections: FR 16143, FR 4125, and NAF 22048, which contain 73-148 letters which span from one folio in length to four folios front and back. Included in these letters are the king’s correspondence to the Germigny, Germigny’s personal and professional correspondence, and even his ledgers of expenses during his time in Constantinople (which I just realized existed in the back of one of the collections). I was overwhelmed by the information when I realized one of the collections was twice as long as I expected, and included much more than just the letters from the King and Queen Mother of France. Suffice it to say, I have more than enough information to reconstruct the ambassador’s experience.

These sources are incredibly rich and provide in-depth discussions of regular meetings between Germigny and Ottoman leaders—some of which were secretive and under the veil of darkness and disguise (but to be fair these were rare—and the contents of the conversation. Incredibly careful reading is important here because to my knowledge nothing of the sort exists in the Ottoman archives to check Germigny’s statements (and even if they did, I do not currently have access to them). The best I have is a Muhhimmi Defteri from the same period, which is the imperial register that provides summaries of outgoing orders from the imperial council. These allow me to roughly check Germigny’s statements on general Ottoman policy to understand how well/poorly informed or—the opposite side of that coin—how much he exaggerated/caricatured Ottoman politics.

So far I’m very pleased with my research, even though I have so much more to do (seriously, so much more reading). Right now Germigny’s experience has much to say about Europeans in the Ottoman Empire. One of the historiographical arguments recent historians like Dursteler began pushing against was that Europeans interacted little with Ottoman Muslims but used minority ethnic/religious groups as go-betweens. Germigny’s experience demonstrates very clearly that was not the case for him. Quite the opposite, so far my research indicates that Germigny interacted frequently with Ottoman Muslims, and that he understood Ottoman politics well enough to align his interests with those factions in Constantinople that most closely shared them.