Enlightenment and Revolutions

The man who would dismantle the wealthiest slave colony in the Americas began his military career at nearly fifty years old, carrying the contradictions of a world he was destined to rupture.

To strip a child of his name is to attempt to erase his past, and by the time he was purchased by a Royal Navy lieutenant, the boy from West Africa had already been called Michael and Jacob.

To abolish slavery permanently in the Americas, Jean-Jacques Dessalines first had to defeat three European empires.

Discontent in the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain did not begin with a desire for a new nation, but with a demand for the rights of Englishmen.

Few men have bound the American continent to its tragic, divided destiny quite like Eli Whitney.

The boy who may have drummed for French forces at the Siege of Savannah in 1779, and who reportedly spent his youth working as a mason, sailor, or stable hand in Saint-Domingue, would die bearing the title of King.

The trajectory of modern European history was fundamentally reshaped by a native of Corsica who began life as Napoleone di Buonaparte.

Before he became the architect of South American liberation, José Francisco de San Martín y Matorras spent decades serving the very empire he would eventually dismantle.

Until the age of eighteen, George Stephenson could neither read nor write.

In the ruins of a young widower’s grief lay the seeds of an imperial collapse.

By the late 1780s, France was a society buckling under its own weight, its population having swelled to 28 million while its antiquated state machinery remained paralyzed by a compounding economic crisis, bad harvests,…

No other event in the history of the Atlantic world so radically upended the global order as the night of August 22, 1791, when enslaved Africans rose up in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

The woman who would call herself Sojourner Truth began her life speaking Dutch in the hilly lowlands of Swartekill, New York.