Zana’s Reviews > Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World > Status Update
Zana
is 41% done
"The slave-ship market was dominated by British vessels, and from 1640 to the early nineteenth century Lloyds of London was the global centre for insuring this industry. One insurance claim related to the slave ship Zong, whose crew, fearing that their supplies of drinking water had fallen too low, had deliberately thrown overboard more than 130 captives taken from the Gold Coast in 1781."
— Nov 15, 2025 10:46PM
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Zana’s Previous Updates
Zana
is 77% done
"...the economist Thomas Piketty calculated in 2020 that the Haitians are owed $ 28 billion by the French government as restitution for the debts incurred for their independence payments. The authorities in Paris have so far responded with resounding silence."
— Nov 23, 2025 06:37AM
Zana
is 77% done
"The first black students at Harvard faced intense hostility: one of them was Martin Delany. Before becoming the author of Blake, Delany had been a talented freshman at Harvard Medical School. He was expelled in 1850, less than two terms into his first semester, because white students refused to accept his presence."
— Nov 23, 2025 06:36AM
Zana
is 77% done
"Harvard Law School was established with significant financial support from an Antigua-based enslaver family, and before 1865 enslaved Africans carried the books and bags of students attending classes."
— Nov 23, 2025 06:36AM
Zana
is 76% done
"The last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States was Matilda McCrear, who died in 1940. She was captured from Dahomey in west Africa and brought to Alabama in 1860; in 1931, when in her seventies, she unsuccessfully filed a claim for reparations at the Dallas County Courthouse."
— Nov 23, 2025 06:36AM
Zana
is 76% done
"Drawing on French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English sources, Ana Lucia Araujo has shown that petitions for financial and material reparations have been consistently made by formerly enslaved people and their descendants for well over two centuries."
— Nov 23, 2025 06:12AM
Zana
is 76% done
"...former French settlers from Saint-Domingue also received a settlement extorted from the Haitian government in 1825. It bears repeating that this was the only time in modern history when former captives directly compensated slave-owners."
— Nov 23, 2025 06:12AM
Zana
is 70% done
"After a brief period until the late 1870s, which saw continued efforts to make post-Civil War America a more democratic and inclusive society, the so-called Reconstruction period came to an end, and was followed by a conservative turn across the United States. In the South, white supremacist visions re-emerged powerfully, celebrating the Confederacy as a ‘Lost Cause’..."
— Nov 23, 2025 04:49AM
Zana
is 70% done
"In Texas the anniversary that took pride of place was June 19th, marking the date in 1865 when Union troops in Galveston Bay proclaimed the emancipation of 250,000 enslaved people from that state. These ‘Juneteenth’ commemorations, as they came to be known in the late nineteenth century, became a fixture until the Great War."
— Nov 23, 2025 04:47AM
Zana
is 70% done
"Emancipation was celebrated on different days by communities in the North and South. Some chose dates to mark Lincoln’s original 1863 Proclamation on 22 September or his final one on 1 January, which came to be known as ‘Freedom Day’. Others picked 9 April, when Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Northern commander, Ulysses Grant."
— Nov 23, 2025 04:47AM
Zana
is 59% done
"Fermina, who had been held in shackles for her insurgent activities in the months preceding the November uprising, led the rebels to the homes of the estate owners and their managers. When she came across one of the most brutal overseers, she exclaimed to her comrades: ‘grab that fat white man and hit him with your machete, for he is the one who puts us in shackles’."
— Nov 20, 2025 05:07PM
