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Letters of Catherine Benincasa
Author: St. Catherine
ISBN-10: 1438500084
ISBN-13: 9781438500089
Published: 2008-07-28
Publisher: Book Jungle
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Book Description:
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
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Amazons of Black Sparta : The Women Warriors of Dahomey
Author: Stanley B. Alpern
ISBN-10: 0814706770
ISBN-13: 9780814706770
Published: 1998-12-01
Publisher: NYU Press
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Book Description:
History is rife with tales of fighting women. More often than not, these stories prove more legend than history. Dating back to the amazons of ancient Asia Minor, myths of fierce, autonomous women of martial excellence abound. And yet, the only thoroughly documented amazons in world history are the women warriors of Dahomy, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western African kingdom. Once dubbed a "small black Sparta," residents of Dahomy shared with the Spartans an intense militarism and sense of collectivism. Moreover, the women of both kingdoms prided themselves on bodies hardened from childhood by rigorous physical exercise. But Spartan women kept in shape to breed male warriors, Dahomean amazons to kill them. Originally a praetorian guard, the Dahomeans developed into a force 6,000 strong and were granted semi-sacred status. They lusted for battle, fighting with fury and valor until the kingdom's final defeat by France in 1892. Stanley B. Alpern has chronicled this remarkable history in depth for the first time. The product of meticulous archival research, Amazons of Black Sparta is defined by Alpern's gift for narrative and will stand as the most comprehensive and accessible account of the woman warriors of Dahomy.
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Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity
Author: Isidore Okpewho
ISBN-10: 0253333962
ISBN-13: 9780253333964
Published: 1999-03-22
Publisher: Indiana University Press
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Book Description:
"Isidore Okpewho has written another landmark study.... Written with exceptional clarity, accessible, yet vigorously argued and sparkling with illustrative insights, Once Upon a Kingdom is immeasurably delightful to read. Like anything Okpewho has ever written, the boook has set the terms for future studies in the field." —World Literature Today"Okpewho gives us yet again a work of outstanding scholarship that is also a joy to read." —Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart"Indispensable for collections of black or oral literature and history... " —Choice"An incisive analysis by one of the leading Africanist scholars that manages to be at once enjoyable, informative and challenging. This timely and authoritative book represents a new stage in the study of African narrative which will interest and challenge (or arouse) students of narrative whatever their geographical specialism." —Ruth FinneganThe communities that once lived in the pale of the West African kingdom of Benin still tell stories that show traces of their ingrained resentment of the kingdom. Isidore Okpewho uses stories he collected from narrators in these communities to reveal an effort by marginalized peoples to defend themselves and their place in an uneven socio-political landscape.
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Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (Cass Series--British Politics and Society,)
Author:
ISBN-10: 071468158X
ISBN-13: 9780714681580
Published: 2001-09-03
Publisher: Routledge
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Book Description:
As a result of new research, we can now paint a more complex picture of peoples and cultures in the south Atlantic, from the earliest period of the slave trade up to the present. The nine papers in this volume indicate that a dynamic and continuous movement of peoples east as well as west across the Atlantic forged diverse and vibrant re-inventions and re-interpretations of the rich mix of cultures represented by Africans and peoples of African descent on both continents.
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Ouidah: Social History Of Western African Slaving Port (Western African Studies)
Author: Robin Law
ISBN-10: 0821415719
ISBN-13: 9780821415719
Published: 2004-12-31
Publisher: Ohio University Press
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The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America
Author:
ISBN-10: 1558764305
ISBN-13: 9781558764309
Published: 2006-12-05
Publisher: Markus Wiener Pub
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Book Description:
This is the biography of an American slave who was born in Africa. His adventures brought him to Rio de Janeiro, New York, Boston, Canada, and Britain; he knew Arabic, Dendi, probably Hausa, Portuguese, English, and French. In recent times scholars raised the doubt that such biographies of slaves born in Africa were only partially true, the editors traveled to Diougou and Brazil and followed the traces of Baquaqua, collection, documents, oral hisrtory and written reports. They photographed the sites described by Baquaqua and included them in the book. They have also added several letters and other documents to the 1854 original edition. Baquaqua was enslaved in northern Benin in the early 1840s when he was about 20. At the time he was a bodyguard for the ruler of a subordinate town. He was abducted, taken south through Togo to Ouidah, a port in Dahomey, shipped to Pernambuco in Brazil, and sold to a merchant from Rio, who sold him to another Rio merchant, who took him by ship to New York City, where a little-known black group, the New York Vigilance Society, convinced him to jump ship. He escaped to Boston and traveled to Haiti, the only free Black state, where he was picked up by the Free Baptist Mission. Here Baquaqua converted to Christianity. He later returned to the U.S. and attended college, and traveled extensively. Robin Law, University of Stirling, Scotland, is the author of The Slave Coast of West Africa. Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, is the editor of Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa.
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Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960 (African Studies)
Author: Patrick Manning
ISBN-10: 0521523079
ISBN-13: 9780521523073
Published: 2004-08-26
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
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Book Description:
The small but important region of Dahomey (now the People's Republic of Benin) has played an active role in the world economy throughout the era of mercantile and industrial capitalism, beginning as an exporter of slaves and becoming an exporter of plain oil and palm kernels. This book covers a span of three centuries, integrating into a single framework the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history of Dahomey. Mr Manning has pieced together an extensive body of new evidence and new interpretations: he has combined descriptive evidence with quantitative data on foreign trade, slave demography and colonial government finance, and has used both Marxian and Neoclassical techniques of economic analysis. He argues that, despite the severe strain on population and economic growth caused by the slave trade, the economy continued to expand from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and the colonial state acted as an economic depressant rather than a stimulant.
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Benin: Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria
Author:
ISBN-10: 9053496262
ISBN-13: 9789053496268
Published: 2007-12-15
Publisher: Snoeck Publishers
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Book Description:
Published to accompany the major international touring exhibition which comes to Chicago in the summer of 2008, this monumental volume features more than 500 stunning reproductions alongside important new scholarship on the prized sculptures and carvings of the Benin Kingdom of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century West Africa (pre-colonial Nigeria). It brings together for the first time masterpieces that have been scattered all over the world since the end of the nineteenth century, while simultaneously documenting the fall of the independent kingdom, its reconstitution in the twentieth century and its continued existence through today.From elaborate bas-relief plaques to stately commemorative king's heads and towering elephant tusks embellished with detailed figurative scenes illustrating life at court and the heroic deeds of kings and warriors, the artworks gathered here glorifiy the king as the political and spiritual head of his people and honored his ancestors. The detailed workmanship and outstanding aesthetic quality of Benin's royal sculptures have been compared to the work of the celebrated Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. And their wealth of iconographic detail conveys the sumptuousness of the royal court and its historical importance as a regional powerhouse in the Benin (or Edo) era.
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Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy
Author: Karl Polanyi
ISBN-10: 0404629008
ISBN-13: 9780404629007
Published: 1990-12
Publisher: Ams Pr Inc
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Benin Studies (International African Institute)
Author: R.E. Bradbury
ISBN-10: 0197241921
ISBN-13: 9780197241929
Published: 1973-09-20
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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