2008 (Jerome S. Handler) “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.
2007 (J. S. Handler and M. L. Tuite) “Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph (2007).”
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.
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 focusing 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.
2006 (J. S. Handler and F. W. Lange) “On Interpreting Slave Status from Archaeological Remains.” African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. June.
An early colonial period church cemetery in Campeche, Mexico yielded the skeletal remains of persons who investigators identified as African born; some reports claimed these remains represent the earliest evidence of African slavery yet found in the New World. However, physical evidence in and of itself does not unequivocally demonstrate the social status of the people concerned. Persons of African descent in Campeche at this period could have been free or held other social statuses that were not chattel slaves. Whatever the case, the Campeche remains raise the issue of archaeological interpretations of social systems, in this case the social system of chattel slavery. In this article we reproduce excerpts from the final chapter of our 1978 book on plantation slavery in Barbados; we argue that archaeological remains alone cannot determine the presence of slavery and documentary data are needed to establish its existence.
