Jerome S. Handler

2010 (Jerome Handler), The Old Plantation Painting at Colonial Williamsburg: New Findings and Some Observations. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. December.

Arguably the best known visual depiction of African American life during the eighteenth century, this small watercolor, owned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF), poses a number of questions of interpretation and identification. The artist did not name the painting, which gives a unique visual perspective on early African American life, but former owners gave it the arbitrary title “The Old Plantation,” by which it is now commonly known. The painting, which is unsigned, undated and not given a provenience, depicts what are presumed to be plantation slaves dancing and playing musical instruments within a rural setting. The history of how this painting came to be known and ultimately owned by CWF is well documented in a recently published work by Susan Shames, the decorative arts librarian with CWF. Most importantly, her meticulous genealogical and historical research has identified the artist for the first time, and has also refined earlier speculations on the probable locale of the painting and the approximate date at which it was made.

The Old Plantation Painting at Colonial Williamsburg: New Findings and Some Observations

2009  The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans.  Slavery and Abolition 30: 1-26.

Scholars of the Atlantic slave trade have not systematically addressed the question of what material objects or personal belongings captive Africans took aboard the slave ships and what goods they may have acquired on the Middle Passage. This topic has implications for the archaeology of African descendant sites in the New World and the transmission of African material culture. This paper reviews the evidence for clothing, metal, bead, and other jewelry, amulets, tobacco pipes, musical instruments, and gaming materials. In so doing, the paper provides an empirical foundation for the severe limitations placed upon enslaved Africans in transporting their material culture to the New World.

The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans

2009  (J.S. Handler and K. E. Hayes), Escrava Anastácia: The Iconographic History of a Brazilian Popular Saint.  African Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Africa in a Global World 2: 1-27.

This article describes the transformation of an image depicting an unnamed, enslaved African man wearing a metal facemask, a common form of punishment in colonial Brazil, into the iconic representation of the martyred slave Anastácia/Anastasia, the focus of a growing religious and political movement in Brazil. The authors trace the image to an early 19th century engraving based on a drawing by the Frenchman Jacques Arago. Well over a century later, Arago’s image increasingly became associated with a corpus of myths describing the virtuous suffering and painful death of a female slave named Anastácia. By the 1990s, Arago’s image (and variations of it), now identified as the martyred Anastácia/Anastasia, had proliferated throughout Brazil, an object of devotion for Catholics and practitioners of Umbanda, as well as a symbol of black pride.

Escrava Anastácia: The Iconographic History of a Brazilian Popular Saint

2009 (J.S. Handler and M. Tuite)  The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record.

The approximately 1,235 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public – in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.

2008  Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Smoking Pipes, Tobacco, and the Middle Passage.  African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. June.

This paper briefly addresses tobacco consumption and pipe smoking in Western Africa, and the relevance of these practices to the Atlantic slave trade as well as to the material culture of captive Africans during their forced passage to the New World.

Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Smoking Pipes, Tobacco, and the Middle Passage

2006     (J. S. Handler and A. Steiner), Identifying pictorial images of Atlantic slavery: Three case studies.   Slavery & Abolition 27: 49-69.

During the last several decades, the number of publications on New World slavery and the Atlantic slave trade has increased tremendously. Sometimes these works are lavishly illustrated, but the illustrations are usually not taken directly from primary sources; rather, they are purchased from commercial photo libraries or are taken from secondary works which themselves have depended on commercial houses. Authors, especially of books or encyclopedias destined for a commercial market and wide general readership, pay insufficient attention (or no attention) to the historical and bibliographic contexts of the illustrations they use, and commercial photo libraries that sell images of slavery and the slave trade rarely give bibliographic information on their images; if they do, the information is often
inadequate and misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. This article illustrates these points by focussing on three images that are often reproduced and argues that historical researchers should pay as much attention to the illustrations, and the context in which they were created, that accompany their publications as they do to citing the written sources upon which their research depends.

2002    Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America. Slavery & Abolition 23:25-56.

This paper describes fifteen autobiographical accounts by Africans who survived the physical and psychic hardships of the transatlantic crossing and passed a portion of their lives enslaved in the British Caribbean or British North America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I focus on what the autobiographers relate about their lives in Africa before being taken from their homelands, how they were captured/kidnapped,  transported to coastal ports and placed aboard ships, and their personal experiences during the transatlantic crossing.

Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America

1998    Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados. Slavery & Abolition 19:129-41.

Scholars of New World slavery and the transatlantic slave trade are well aware that there are very few first-hand accounts by enslaved Africans of their experiences prior to being landed in the Caribbean or North America. This article gives a brief overview of some accounts that relate to Barbados and then focuses on two hitherto unpublished autobiographical narratives by Africans who lived on the island in the late eighteenth century. The main purpose of this note is to make available to a wider audience what is currently known about first-hand accounts by Africans who had some connection with the Caribbean island of Barbados.

Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados