Freedom Papers by Rebecca J. Scott5/8/2023 ![]() Vaughan's transnational life history reminds us that American slavery was part of a connected, Atlantic world of bonded labor, one where slavery and freedom were not stark opposites but rather framed a continuum of dependency relations. ![]() Before his 1893 death in Lagos, he sent gold coins to a niece in South Carolina whose business had been torched by the Ku Klux Klan his Nigerian descendants maintained contact with their American relatives, to the present. There, he survived slave raids and political upheaval, saw the imposition of British colonialism, and led a revolt against white missionaries. In the 1850s, James Churchwill Vaughan left South Carolina for Liberia, then continued further east to "Yoruba country," now southwestern Nigeria. Although it has required some retooling in new areas, I'm at work on a contextualized biography of a 19th-century African American who made a life and left an impact in West Africa. Twenty years later, however, I'm no longer resisting the appeal of transnationalism. I turned instead to what seemed to be a more manageable project on colonial Nigerian social history. ![]() But as I contemplated the greater commitment of a dissertation, my attraction to a topic that would require multiple national and linguistic competencies and far-flung research began to flag. ![]() A summer research trip yielded some rich sources, and I managed to publish an article. My first flirtation with transnational history was as a graduate student, when I began a project involving Brazilians in Nigeria. ![]()
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