Randy Michael Sparks

South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times (Southern Women: Their Lives and Times)

This volume, which spans the long period from the sixteenth century through the Civil War era, is remarkable for the religious, racial, ethnic, and class diversity of the women it features. Essays on plantation mistresses, overseers' wives, nonslaveholding women from the upcountry, slave women, and ...

Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870

Much that is commonly accepted about slavery and religion in the Old South is challenged in this significant book. The eight essays included here show that throughout the antebellum period, southern whites and blacks worshipped together, heard the same sermons, took communion and were baptized toget...

Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective

"There is no such thing as a 'natural' disaster," writes Romain Huret in his introduction to this multidisciplinary study of the events surrounding and the legacy of Hurricane Katrina. Though nature produced Katrina's rising waters and destructive winds, a vast array of manmade factors shaped the sc...

Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World

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 ex...

The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey

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 ...

Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade

Annamaboe was the largest slave trading port on the eighteenth-century Gold Coast, and it was home to successful, wily African merchants whose unusual partnerships with their European counterparts made the town and its people an integral part of the Atlantic's webs of exchange. Where the Negroes Are...

Randy Sparks

Randy Sparks (b. 29 July 1933, Leavenworth, Kansas) is a musician, singer-songwriter and founder of The New Christy Minstrels and The Back Porch Majority. ...

The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey