ThoughtGallery.org > A New Canaan in Nicaragua? A Caribbean Experiment in Black Freedom, 1848-1854

A New Canaan in Nicaragua? A Caribbean Experiment in Black Freedom, 1848-1854

The California Gold Rush of the 1850s transformed the Caribbean port town of San Juan del Norte (rechristened Greytown after British occupation in 1848) from a sleepy trading post into a teeming crossroads of cultures and politics. Greytown was at once the easternmost terminus of a likely interoceanic canal and a place—to the great surprise of so many travelers—where much of the commerce and governance was in the hands of people of African descent from the Caribbean, the US, and Nicaragua. Greytown’s inhabitants increasingly sought to fashion the town as an island of political freedom, racial equality, and entrepreneurial independence in a sea of American imperialism, white supremacy, and commercial expansionism.

Justin Wolfe is associate professor and William Arceneaux Professor of Latin American History at Tulane University. He is the author of The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua, and the co-editor of the collection Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place. He is currently at work on a project that explores the intersection of race and empire in the age of U.S. Manifest Destiny through a rich microhistory of Caribbean Nicaragua and a larger-scale history of the African-descent contribution to Nicaraguan history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.











When: Thu., Feb. 12, 2015 at 6:00 pm
Where: Barnard College
3009 Broadway
212-854-4689
Price: Free
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The California Gold Rush of the 1850s transformed the Caribbean port town of San Juan del Norte (rechristened Greytown after British occupation in 1848) from a sleepy trading post into a teeming crossroads of cultures and politics. Greytown was at once the easternmost terminus of a likely interoceanic canal and a place—to the great surprise of so many travelers—where much of the commerce and governance was in the hands of people of African descent from the Caribbean, the US, and Nicaragua. Greytown’s inhabitants increasingly sought to fashion the town as an island of political freedom, racial equality, and entrepreneurial independence in a sea of American imperialism, white supremacy, and commercial expansionism.

Justin Wolfe is associate professor and William Arceneaux Professor of Latin American History at Tulane University. He is the author of The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua, and the co-editor of the collection Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place. He is currently at work on a project that explores the intersection of race and empire in the age of U.S. Manifest Destiny through a rich microhistory of Caribbean Nicaragua and a larger-scale history of the African-descent contribution to Nicaraguan history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Buy tickets/get more info now