Sharla M. Fett - Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade

This book has been long in the making. I could never have written it without the insight and support of many colleagues, friends, and family members. Many years ago at the Virginia Historical Society, Lee Shepard and Frances Pollard introduced me to the history of recaptive journeys by suggesting that I look at William Proby Youngs ship log. The Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA provided an incubating space in which to begin thinking about how to tell the story of West Central African youth in the immediate wake of slave ship captivity. As the project picked up speed, a critical long-term Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library afforded the luxury of a years research in a rich intellectual climate. I am also indebted to Occidental Colleges faculty sabbatical program and the Faculty Enrichment Grants that enabled research, travel, and precious time to think and write. My thanks as well to the many archivists and librarians who answered my queries at the South Carolina Historical Society, the South Caroliniana Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the West Virginia and Regional History Center, the Monroe County Public Library in Key West, and the National Archives and Records Administration. Thanks to Brooke Guthrie at Duke Universitys David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library for her quick response to a key archival finding.

On my long and humbling journey to becoming an Atlantic historian, I learned from many generous colleagues. My fellow Occidental College historians Jem Axelrod, Sasha Day, Lynn Dumenil, Michael Gasper, Nina Gelbart, Jane Hong, Maryanne Horowitz, Paul Nam, Alexandra Puerto, Lisa Sousa, and Marla Stone have been a front line of support, offering insights from their own fields of research. Carol Siu and John De La Fontaine went the extra mile to assist with interlibrary loans and database access. From my year at the Huntington Library, Im grateful for conversations with Nancy Bercaw, Roy Ritchie, LeeAnn Whites, and especially Kevin Dawson, who generously shared sources and insights in subsequent years. Ariela Gross and Judith Jackson Fossett hosted an interdisciplinary slavery studies working group at the University of Southern California that introduced me to profound scholarship on issues of legacy and redress. Elsa Barkley Brown, Adam Rothman, and Jessica Marie Johnson, along with other participants in the African American Political Culture Workshop at the University of Maryland, College Park, offered just the right critiques at a key point in my thinking about Atlantic child trafficking and recaptivity. Sandra Gunning and participants in the Neoslaveries in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World Symposium at the University of Michigan helped me to think comparatively about the eras many forced migrations. Im grateful to Carla Pestana, Robin Derby, and Andrew Apter for involving me in the UCLA Atlantic History Speaker Series and to Alex Borucki for opportunities to share work with UC Irvines History Department and Medical Humanities Initiative. Corey Malcom, director of archaeology at the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, took time to give me a historical tour of Key West and shared his own extensive research on recaptives of the