The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Welcome to Atlantic Travelers!
The curators at work, from their home offices spread all over the world.
After Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, the Atlantic Ocean ceased to be a barrier separating two isolated worlds and became a highway that connected two ends of a larger geographic unit. Columbus and his crew were followed by millions of travelers who, voluntarily or not, traversed the Atlantic either to settle permanently in the Americas or as part of itinerant trajectories that took them from one side of the Atlantic to the other many times throughout their lives. This online exhibit presents and analyzes the Atlantic trajectories of conquistadors, pirates, slaves, businessmen, loyalist refugees, black sailors, healers, military adventurers, and women whose Atlantic crossings contributed to the creation of an Atlantic World.
Those whose lives appear in this website allow us to analyze key themes in Atlantic history including the conquest and settlement of the Americas (and the politics behind both terms), piracy, gender and society, the transatlantic slave trade and the creation of African diasporas, seafaring, and revolutionary ideologies, movements, and transformations. While in many ways exceptional and unrepresentative, their lives, as James Sweet put it in his study of Domingos Álvares, open "windows onto broader sets of human experiences that defined the Atlantic world."
In this site you will find what came out of our readings, weekly discussions, and individual research during the spring semester of 2020, a term that will never be forgotten.
Thank you for joining us in the exploration of the lives of these Atlantic travelers. Enjoy your navigation!