Jerome S. Handler

2006, 2007  Bibliographic Addenda to Guides for the Study of Barbados History, 1971 & 1991: Installment One, Installment Two. Jl. of the Barbados Mus. and Hist. Soc. Vol 52: 35-53; Vol 53: 199-211.

Published and some manuscript materials that have come to my attention since the publication of “A Guide to Source Materials for the Study of Barbados History, 1627-1834″ ( Southern Illinois University Press, 1971; reprinted Oak Knoll Press, 2002), and “Supplement to A Guide to Source Materials for the Study of Barbados History, 1627-1834″ (The John Carter Brown Library, 1991).

Bibliographic Addenda to Guides for the Study of Barbados History, 1971 & 1991: Installment One

Bibliographic Addenda to Guides for the Study of Barbados History, 1971 & 1991: Installment Two

2007  From Cambay in India to Barbados in the Caribbean: Two Unique Beads from a Plantation Slave Cemetery. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. March. 

In the early 1970s, archaeological investigations at Newton plantation in Barbados recovered the skeletal remains of 104 individuals, interred from approximately 1660 to around 1820. Twelve of the burials were associated with close to 900 beads. These beads represented a variety of types, including two distinctive large reddish-orange carnelian beads. Despite the excavation of additional burials at Newton in the late 1990s which also recovered some beads associated with several burials, and considerable archaeological work since the early 1970s in African diasporic sites in the Caribbean and North America (including the massive “African Burial Ground” in New York City, as far as I can ascertain the two Newton specimens are still the only examples of their kind from New World sites. They remain unusual and unique material legacies of the transatlantic slave trade to Britain’s American colonies.

From Cambay in India to Barbados in the Caribbean: Two Unique Beads from a Plantation Slave Cemetery

2007 (J.S. Handler and M. L. Tuite), Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph (2007). http://www.retouchinghistory.org

This website discusses a Civil War-era posed studio photograph of unidentified black Union soldiers with a white officer. This photograph was the basis for a well-known poster used by the Federal army to recruit black soldiers in the Philadelphia area. The studio photograph has been deliberately falsified in recent years by an unknown person/s sympathetic to the Confederacy. This falsified or fabricated photo, purporting to be of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards (Confederate), has been taken to promote Neo-Confederate views, to accuse Union propagandists of duplicity, and to show that black soldiers were involved in the armed defense of the Confederacy. Here we provide background to the original Civil War-era photograph and discuss why we believe its modern copy is a falsification; we also detail our conjectures as to how this falsification was accomplished.

Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph (2007)