Randy J. Sparks's Books

Where the Negroes Are Masters

By: Randy J. Sparks

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Annamaboe--largest slave trading port on the Gold Coast--was home to wily African merchants whose partnerships with Europeans made the town an integral part of Atlantic webs of exchange. Randy Sparks recreates the outpost's feverish bustle and brutality, tracing the entrepreneurs, black and white, who thrived on a lucrative traffic in human beings.

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Page Count

322

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674726472

ISBN 13

9780674726475

The Two Princes of Calabar

An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey

By: Randy J. Sparks

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The Two Princes of Calabar

An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey

By: Randy J. Sparks

In 1767, two “princes” of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes, Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors—and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience. Randy J. Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes’ correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it. They were transported from the coast of Africa to Dominica, where they were sold to a French physician. By employing their considerable language and interpersonal skills, they cleverly negotiated several escapes that took them from the Caribbean to Virginia, and to England, but always ended in their being enslaved again. Finally, in England, they sued for, and remarkably won, their freedom. Eventually, they found their way back to Old Calabar and, evidence suggests, resumed their business of slave trading. The Two Princes of Calabar offers a rare glimpse into the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and slave trade from an African perspective. It brings us into the trading communities along the coast of Africa and follows the regular movement of goods, people, and ideas across and around the Atlantic. It is an extraordinary tale of slaves’ relentless quest for freedom and their important role in the creation of the modern Atlantic World.

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Page Count

224

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674043898

ISBN 13

9780674043893

Africans in the Old South

Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World

By: Randy J. Sparks

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Africans in the Old South

Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World

By: Randy J. Sparks

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of a range of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores. The subjects of Africans in the Old South include Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations and slaves, passed as white, and integrated herself into the Lowcountry planter elite; Robert Johnson, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia, who later learned English, won his freedom, and joined the abolition movement in the North; Dimmock Charlton, who bought his freedom after being illegally enslaved in Savannah; and a group of unidentified Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, escaped in Mobile’s port, and were recaptured and eventually returned to their homeland. These exceptional lives challenge long-held assumptions about how the slave trade operated and who was involved. The African Atlantic was a complex world characterized by constant movement, intricate hierarchies, and shifting identities. Not all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were enslaved, nor was the voyage always one-way.

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Page Count

217

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674495160

ISBN 13

9780674495166

Religion in Mississippi

By: Randy J. Sparks

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Religion in Mississippi

By: Randy J. Sparks

In the 1600s Colonial French settlers brought Christianity into the lands that are now the state of Mississippi. Throughout the period of French rule and the period of Spanish dominion that followed, Roman Catholicism remained the principal religion. By the time that statehood was achieved in 1817, Mississippi was attracting Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestant evangelical faiths at a remarkable pace, and by the twentieth century, religion in Mississippi was dominantly Protestant and evangelical. In this book, Randy J. Sparks traces the roots of evangelical Christianity in the state and shows how the evangelicals became a force of cultural revolution. They embraced the poorer segments of society, welcomed high populations of both women and African Americans, and deeply influenced ritual and belief in the state's vision of Christianity. In the 1830s as the Mississippi economy boomed, so did evangelicalism. As Protestant faiths became wedded to patriarchal standards, slaveholding, and southern political tradition, seeds were sown for the war that would erupt three decades later. Until Reconstruction many Mississippi churches comprised biracial congregations and featured women in prominent roles, but as the Civil War and the racial split cooled the evangelicals' liberal fervor and drastically changed the democratic character of their religion into arch-conservatism, a strong but separate black church emerged. As dominance by Protestant conservatives solidified, Jews, Catholics, and Mormons struggled to retain their religious identities while conforming to standards set by white Protestant society. As Sparks explores the dissonance between the state's powerful evangelical voice and Mississippi's social and cultural mores, he reveals the striking irony of faith and society in conflict. By the time of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, religion, formerly a liberal force, had become one of the leading proponents of segregation, gender inequality, and ethnic animosity among whites in the Magnolia State. Among blacks, however, the churches were bastions of racial pride and resistance to the forces of oppression.

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Page Count

412

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1617035807

ISBN 13

9781617035807

Russell County, Virginia Marriages, 1923-1935

By: Randy F. McNew Crouse

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Russell County, Virginia Marriages, 1923-1935

By: Randy F. McNew Crouse

In Author Spotlight page (link above), look under "About" to find additional Discount Code. A transcription of all information in the Russell County, Virginia Marriage register for the period. A total of 2,746 marriages including some 19,000 individuals were transcribed beginning in 1923 and ending in 1935. Separate groom and bride indices, sorted by surname, are provided. The register contains the names of the parents, ages, birthplaces, marital condition, and residences of the parties and the groom's occupation. Marriage and Occupational statistics are compiled for each year and summarized in tables and graphs. All entries were checked and rechecked using primary sources. This book will be of interest to those tracing family history in Russell County, Virginia, sociologists, demographers and students of depression era Central Appalachia. Includes photos of some of the couples whose marriages are listed here.

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Page Count

250

Publisher

Lulu.com

Published Date

ISBN 10

1312934077

ISBN 13

9781312934078

Book's by Randy J. Sparks

Where the Negroes Are Masters

Where the Negroes Are Masters

The Two Princes of Calabar

The Two Princes of Calabar

Africans in the Old South

Africans in the Old South

Religion in Mississippi

Religion in Mississippi

Russell County, Virginia Marriages, 1923-1935

Russell County, Virginia Marriages, 1923-1935

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