Freedom, Law and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution

Rebecca J. Scott, professor of history and law at the University of Michigan, will present "Rosalie of The Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution" Monday, Oct. 19,  4-6 p.m. in Hyde Hall.

This event is free and open to the public.

Event sponsors are the UNC department of history, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Institute for the Study of the Americas, and the Initiative for a Center and Program for Transoceanic
18th- and 19th-Century Studies (CTOS).

Rebecca J. Scott

Rebecca J. Scott is the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Her fields of research are Latin American and Cuban history; the history of slavery and emancipation; and race, law and citizenship in the United States. Her most recent book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, was published by Harvard University Press in 2005 and received the Frederick Douglass Prize and the John Hope Franklin Prize.

"Rosalie" Background

Around 1785 a woman called "Rosalie of the Poulard nation" was taken captive in West Africa and deported to the French colony of Saint-Domingue. In her talk, Rebecca Scott will use the history of Rosalie and her descendants to explore the dynamics of enslavement and emancipation and to understand some of the varieties of right-lessness and rights-consciousness that emerged in the Atlantic world across the 19th century.

Scott will focus on the first three generations of the family—from Senegambia, Saint-Domingue and Santiago (Cuba) to New Orleans and France—and will structure the story around the archival documents that have made it possible to reconstruct this itinerary, beginning with a letter written in 1899 by a cigar-maker in Antwerp to General Máximo Gómez, hero of the Cuban war of independence.