Rich and poor, white and black, free and slave: The social history of Cuba's tobacco farmers, 1763--1817

Tobacco was of primary importance to Spain, and its impact on Cuba's economy and society was greater than just the numbers of farms, workers, or production, demonstrated by the Spanish crown's outlay of monies for capital assets, bureaucrats' salaries, and payments to farmers for their crop. This study is a micro- and macro-level study of rural life in colonial Cuba and the interconnected relationships among society, agricultural production, state control, and the island's economic development. ^ By placing Cuba's tobacco farmers at the forefront of this social history, this work revisits and offers alternatives to two prevailing historiographical views of rural Cuba from 1763 (the year Havana returned to Spanish control following the Seven Years' War) to 1817 (the final year of the 100-year royal monopoly on Cuban tobacco). Firstly, it argues against the primacy of sugar over other agricultural crops, a view that has shaped decades of scholarship, and challenges the thesis which maintains the Cuban tobacco farmer was almost exclusively poor, white, and employed free labor, rather than slaves, in the production of their crop. ^ This study establishes the importance of tobacco as an agricultural product, and argues that Cuban tobacco growers were a heterogeneous group, revealing the role that its cultivation may have played in helping some slaves earn their freedom. ^

Representation of people of color in the nineteenth century slavery novel in Cuba and Brazil

This dissertation explores the similarities and differences which characterize the depiction of people of color in certain representative nineteenth century Cuban and Brazilian slavery novels as a function of the authorial approach of each territory's literary tradition toward the issues of slavery, racial prejudice, and people of color. The selected texts, derived from the peak periods in slavery literature of each territory, include Francisco , by Anselmo Snárez y Romero; Sab, by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; Cecilia Valdés , by Cirilo Villaverde; A escrava Isaura, by Bernardo Guimarães; O mulato, by Aluísio Azevedo; and Bom-Crioulo, by Adolfo Caminha. While the present study explores the enslavement, abuse, and discrimination of people of color as a consequence of a deep-seated discourse of power, privilege and racial superiority, it focuses more extensively on the representation of people of color, particularly in their capacity to constructively appropriate the cultural values of the white dominant group and recognize their identity as ambiguous. ^ Said's theories of Orientalist discourse and geography and formation as well as Dube's perspective on subaltern-oriented studies provide a theoretical framework for exploring the response of slavery writers whose common exposure to slavery but dissimilar socio-political contexts generate some startling findings. Crafted within a period of political repression, fear of black revolt, factional in-fighting as well as strong socioeconomic ties to the slaveholding class, the Cuban texts generally fashioned an approach to slavery as one marked by moderation, reform, and cultural counter discourse and consequently depict people of color with a more passive but culturally authentic outlook. On the other hand, the Brazilian response to the issue of slavery, steeped in an ideological amalgam of liberalism, positivism, republicanism, and abolitionism, is characterized by overt opposition to slavery and a representation of people of color that is less concerned with cross-cultural input but reclaims their humanity as highly educable and socially mobile persons in search of greater freedoms. Ultimately, there is a shared message of higher significance couched in the worthwhile mission of raising slaves to the level of men. ^

Inter-subjective and transnational racial effects: The role of the United States in the formation and evolution of the collective perception and racial relations in Cuba, 1898–1902

Since the arrival of the first African slaves to Cuba in 1524, the issue of race has had a long-lived presence in the Cuban national discourse. However, despite Cuba’s colonial history, it has often been maintained by some historians that race relations in Cuba were congenial with racism and racial discrimination never existing as deep or widespread in Cuba as in the United States (Cannon, 1983, p. 113). In fact, it has been argued that institutionalized racism was introduced into Cuban society with the first U.S. occupation, during 1898–1902 (Cannon, 1983, p. 113). This study of Cuba investigates the influence of the United States on the development of race relations and racial perceptions in post-independent Cuba, specifically from 1898-1902. These years comprise the time period immediately following the final fight for Cuban Independence, culminating with the Cuban-Spanish-American War and the first U.S. occupation of Cuba. By this time, the Cuban population comprised Africans as well as descendants of Africans, White Spanish people, indigenous Cubans, and offspring of the intermixing of the groups. This research studies whether the United States’ own race relations and racial perceptions influenced the initial conflicting race relations and racial perceptions in early and post-U.S. occupation Cuba. This study uses a collective interpretative framework that incorporates a national level of analysis with a race relations and racial perceptions focus. This framework reaches beyond the traditionally utilized perspectives when interpreting the impact of the United States during and following its intervention in Cuba. Attention is given to the role of the existing social, political climate within the United States as a driving influence of the United States’ involvement with Cuba. This study reveals that emphasis on the role of the United States as critical to the development of Cuba’s race relations and racial perceptions is credible given the extensive involvement of the U.S. in the building of the early Cuban Republic and U.S. structures serving as models for reconstruction. U.S. government formation in Cuba aligned with a governing system reflecting the existing governing codes of the U.S. during that time period.

The peopling of the Bahamas: A phylogeographical perspective

During the past 500 years, the Bahamas has been influenced by a wide array of settlers, including but not limited to, the Arawak Indians, Eleutherian Adventurers, British Loyalists, Creole slaves, liberated Africans as well as Chinese, Greek, Jewish, Lebanese, Jamaican and Haitian migrants. To date, however, only a few reports analyzing the genetic makeup and population dynamics of the Bahamas have been published, making this work pivotal in the endeavor to ascertain the genetic ancestry of these groups. As such, the current investigation was undertaken to genetically characterize six of the more densely populated islands throughout the Northwest (Grand Bahama and Abaco) and Central (Eleuthera, Exuma, Long Island and New Providence) Bahamas using different forensic marker systems. When autosomal STR markers are employed, the Bahamian collections were all found to receive differential contributions from the African, European, East Asian and Native American collections utilized in the analyses. Similar findings were also observed for two other Afro-Caribbean populations, Haiti and Jamaica, although the latter populace was found to share a greater proportion of its autosomal component with non-African sources than the former. On the contrary, analysis of the six Bahamian collections using high-resolution Y-chromosome markers identifies genetic signals emanating exclusively from Africans and Europeans, but this is likely the result of smaller sample sizes collected from each island and/or sex-biased gene flow from East Asian and Native American groups.

Negotiating identities, striving for state recognition: Blacks in Córdoba, Argentina 1776–1853

Race in Argentina played a significant role as a highly durable construct by identifying and advancing subjects (1776–1810) and citizens (1811–1853). My dissertation explores the intricacies of power relations by focusing on the ways in which race informed the legal process during the transition from a colonial to national State. It argues that the State’s development in both the colonial and national periods depended upon defining and classifying African descendants. In response, people of African descendent used the State’s assigned definitions and classifications to advance their legal identities. It employs race and culture as operative concepts, and law as a representation of the sometimes, tense relationship between social practices and the State’s concern for social peace. This dissertation examines the dynamic nature of the court. It utilizes the theoretical concepts multicentric legal orders that are analyzed through weak and strong legal pluralisms, and jurisdictional politics, from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. This dissertation juxtaposes various levels of jurisdiction (canon/state law and colonial/national law) to illuminate how people of color used the legal system to ameliorate their social condition. In each chapter the primary source materials are state generated documents which include criminal, ecclesiastical, civil, and marriage dissent court cases along with notarial and census records. Though it would appear that these documents would provide a superficial understanding of people of color, my analysis provides both a top-down and bottom-up approach that reflects a continuous negotiation for African descendants’ goal for State recognition. These approaches allow for implicit or explicit negotiation of a legal identity that transformed slaves and free African descendants into active agents of their own destinies.

The Chef In Society: Origins And Development

In his discourse - The Chef In Society: Origins And Development - Marcel R. Escoffier, Graduate Student, School of Hospitality Management at Florida International University, initially offers: “The role of the modern professional chef has its origins in ancient Greece. The author traces that history and looks at the evolution of the executive chef as a manager and administrator.” “Chefs, as tradespersons, can trace their origins to ancient Greece,” the author offers with citation. “Most were slaves…” he also informs you. Even at that low estate in life, the chef was master of the slaves and servants who were at close hand in the environment in which they worked. “In Athens, a cook was the master of all the household slaves…” says Escoffier. As Athenian influence wanes and Roman civilization picks-up the torch, chefs maintain and increase their status as important tradesmen in society. “Here the first professional societies of cooks were formed, almost a hierarchy,” Escoffier again cites the information. “It was in Rome that cooks established their first academy: Colleqium Coquorum,” he further reports. Chefs, again, increase their significance during the following Italian Renaissance as the scope of their influence widens. “…it is an historical fact that the marriage of Henry IV and Catherine de Medici introduced France to the culinary wonders of the Italian Renaissance,” Escoffier enlightens you. “Certainly the professional chef in France became more sophisticated and more highly regarded by society after the introduction of the Italian cooking concepts.” The author wants you to know that by this time cookbooks are already making important inroads and contributing to the history of cooking above and beyond their obvious informational status. Outside of the apparent European influences in cooking, Escoffier also ephemerally mentions the development of Chinese and Indian chefs. “It is interesting to note that the Chinese, held by at least one theory as the progenitors of most of the culinary heritage, never developed a high esteem for the position of chef,” Escoffier maintains the historical tack. “It was not until the middle 18th Century that the first professional chef went public. Until that time, only the great houses of the nobility could afford to maintain a chef,” Escoffier notes. This private-to-public transition, in conjunction with culinary writing are benchmarks for the profession. Chefs now establish authority and eminence. The remainder of the article devotes itself to the development of the professional chef; especially the melding of two seminal figures in the culinary arts, Cesar Ritz and August Escoffier. The works of Frederick Taylor are also highlighted.

Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Teleoperation

While the robots gradually become a part of our daily lives, they already play vital roles in many critical operations. Some of these critical tasks include surgeries, battlefield operations, and tasks that take place in hazardous environments or distant locations such as space missions. In most of these tasks, remotely controlled robots are used instead of autonomous robots. This special area of robotics is called teleoperation. Teleoperation systems must be reliable when used in critical tasks; hence, all of the subsystems must be dependable even under a subsystem or communication line failure. These systems are categorized as unilateral or bilateral teleoperation. A special type of bilateral teleoperation is described as force-reflecting teleoperation, which is further investigated as limited- and unlimited-workspace teleoperation. Teleoperation systems configured in this study are tested both in numerical simulations and experiments. A new method, Virtual Rapid Robot Prototyping, is introduced to create system models rapidly and accurately. This method is then extended to configure experimental setups with actual master systems working with system models of the slave robots accompanied with virtual reality screens as well as the actual slaves. Fault-tolerant design and modeling of the master and slave systems are also addressed at different levels to prevent subsystem failure. Teleoperation controllers are designed to compensate for instabilities due to communication time delays. Modifications to the existing controllers are proposed to configure a controller that is reliable in communication line failures. Position/force controllers are also introduced for master and/or slave robots. Later, controller architecture changes are discussed in order to make these controllers dependable even in systems experiencing communication problems. The customary and proposed controllers for teleoperation systems are tested in numerical simulations on single- and multi-DOF teleoperation systems. Experimental studies are then conducted on seven different systems that included limited- and unlimited-workspace teleoperation to verify and improve simulation studies. Experiments of the proposed controllers were successful relative to the customary controllers. Overall, by employing the fault-tolerance features and the proposed controllers, a more reliable teleoperation system is possible to design and configure which allows these systems to be used in a wider range of critical missions.

Arquitetura, cidade e território no Brasil colonial: a contribuição dos carmelitas calçados da Bahia e Pernambuco (1580-1800)

This study investigates the religious group named 'shoe wearing carmelites' (or Calced Carmelites) from Brazil´s Order of Carmo, from 1580 until 1800, in the Capitaincy of Bahia de Todos os Santos (Recôncavo, city of Salvador and Sergipe) and in the Capitaincy of Pernambuco (Alagoas, Pernambuco and Itamaracá). The study does not include the religious group known as the 'Reformed' Carmelites from Goiana, Recife and Paraíba convents. The Order of Carmo is a religious order from the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the 12th century. By the 16th century they were split into 'Calced' and 'Discalced'. In 1580 the Calced ones came from Portugal to Brazil, built convents in urban areas and were able to acquire slaves, farms and other assets. As any other religious order, the Carmelites had their modus operandi. This work emphasizes the way they operated or acted in the city, either individually or in association with other Carmelite religious foundations elsewhere (networking). Their action affected, although indirectly, the building of some specific aspects of the architecture, the city and the territory in colonial Brazil. The main objective of this study is to demonstrate the impact of the Calced Carmelites from Bahia and Pernambuco upon the territory of colonial Brazil, which is analyzed according to three scales: 1) the region or interurban; 2) the city or intraurban; 3) the building or the architecture. The research employs the comparative method of analysis, especially for the architectural scale. The work demonstrates that although not acting as architects or urbanists, the Carmelites contributed to the formation of the colonial territory of Brazil, behaving as a well-articulated and hierarchized religious network, from an economic and social perspective. Moreover, they influenced the emergence and growth of several colonial urban nuclei, from Bahia to Pernambuco, mainly in the surroundings of their religious buildings. Finally, it is very clear this religious order’s contribution to colonial architecture, as it can be seen by the architectural characteristics of the convents and churches which have been analyzed, many of which still stand in a good state of conservation nowadays.

A SENSIBILIDADE CULTURAL DO ADVENTISMO COMO MODELO MISSIOLÓGICO EM GRANDES CENTROS URBANOS: UMA ANÁLISE DE IGREJAS ADVENTISTAS ÉTNICAS NA CIDADE DE SÃO PAULO

Esta pesquisa objetiva analisar o desenvolvimento da missão adventista na cidade de São Paulo em busca de um modelo missiológico para centros urbanos. São Paulo, uma das maiores metrópoles do mundo tem uma formação cultural plural, não apenas pelas forças atuantes da modernização, secularização, globalização e pós-modernidade. A composição da população da cidade possui uma gênese étnica plural. Além da matriz autóctone indígena, do colonizador branco europeu e dos escravos africanos, desde o início do século XIX chegaram outros imigrantes, europeus e asiáticos. Nas primeiras décadas do século XX, o Brasil foi o país que mais recebeu imigrantes em todo o mundo. Estima-se que nos anos de 1920, apenas um terço da população na cidade de São Paulo fosse de brasileiros, o restante era composto por imigrantes. A inserção do adventismo em São Paulo se deu por missionários imigrantes que trabalharam primeiro com outros imigrantes antes de evangelizar e desenvolver a missão adventista com os brasileiros nacionais. De alguma forma, esse início deixou marcas na missão adventista paulistana. São Paulo é hoje a cidade com o maior número total de adventistas no mundo e a única com Igrejas Adventistas étnicas que atendem cinco grupos étnicos distintos: japoneses, coreanos, judeus, árabes e bolivianos/peruanos. Esta pesquisa busca investigar a formação de uma sensibilidade cultural no adventismo paulistano que lhe permitiu dialogar com a pluralidade cultural da metrópole paulistana

Enigmas monetarios en el derecho local. Los mencales y maravedís en los fueros castellanos

La historia de la moneda en la Castilla medieval ha estado siempre mediatizada por la convivencia no siempre armónica entre dos sistemas monetarios muy diferentes. Uno basado en la plata, de origen europeo, otro centrado en el oro, de raíces árabes. La necesidad de conectar y de establecer unas equivalencias entre ellos se convirtió pronto en una necesidad, máxime cuando las monedas de oro incrementaron sus variantes. En esta compleja situación aparecen mencales y maravedís citados conjuntamente en muchos fueros: Zorita, Uclés, Cuenca,... sin que su naturaleza quede del todo clara. Este artículo compara estas referencias y analiza las equivalencias que los unen. Como colofón al trabajo podemos afirmar que los maravedís citados en cada texto corresponden a monedas áureas de distinto peso y valor mientras el mencal es identificado con un ponderal de oro que los relaciona.

Jubilee and the Limits of African American Freedom after Emancipation

Scholarship generated in the post-civil rights US underpins a growing consensus that any honest confrontation with the American past requires an acknowledgment both of the nation’s foundations in racially-based slave labour and of the critical role that the enslaved played in ending that system. But scholars equally need to examine why the end of slavery did not deliver freedom, but instead – after a short-lived ‘jubilee’ during which freedpeople savoured their ‘brief moment in the sun’ – opened up a period of extreme repression and violence. This article traces the political trajectory of one prominent ex-slave and Republican party organiser, Elias Hill, to assess the constraints in which black grassroots activists operated. Though mainly concerned with the dashed hopes of African Americans, their experience of a steep reversal is in many ways the shared and profoundly significant legacy of ex-slaves across the former plantation societies of the Atlantic world.

FPGA-based soft-core processors for image processing applications

With security and surveillance, there is an increasing need to process image data efficiently and effectively either at source or in a large data network. Whilst a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been seen as a key technology for enabling this, the design process has been viewed as problematic in terms of the time and effort needed for implementation and verification. The work here proposes a different approach of using optimized FPGA-based soft-core processors which allows the user to exploit the task and data level parallelism to achieve the quality of dedicated FPGA implementations whilst reducing design time. The paper also reports some preliminary
progress on the design flow to program the structure. An implementation for a Histogram of Gradients algorithm is also reported which shows that a performance of 328 fps can be achieved with this design approach, whilst avoiding the long design time, verification and debugging steps associated with conventional FPGA implementations.

Sunray etched Visors for the Jamaican Olympic Team in three colours: yellow, green and black

Design for visors for the delegation from Jamaica to the London Olympic Games 2012. This design was commissioned by PUMA 2012 based on McLean's designs featured in the website House of Flora, which functions as a space of display, archive, folio, point of sale and dissemination. The McLean standard design for visors is a component of the avant garde, pret a porter millinery, accessory design collections, and stylistically customised for the Jamaican team. McLean's oeuvre is original in its integration of the experimental traditions of art school workshop culture with the professional demands of fashion manufacture and trade culture. Combining the innovation of the postmodern urban artisan with the exacting demands of industrial production, dissemination and distribution McLean's design work spans the disparate worlds of national art collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (A Hat Anthology Exhibition, and catalogue 2009), London Design Museum ( Fifty Hats that Changed the World 2009). Integrating design considerations of multiple and mass production with the stylistic considerations of the studio workshop McLean brings the wit of the avant garde urban artisan to the structures and systems of fashion industry. The designs reach to a global audience as product users, as well as to the international connoisseurship of crafts and design specialists. The rigour of McLean's research and innovation is evident in the specificity of the stylistic references made through her selection of materials, processes, form, colour and symbolism. A range of cultural references cite the rich fusion of early twentieth century modernist culture in which the disparate worlds of popular, proletarian, culture fertilised the stylistic austerity of high modern formalism. McLean here considers the relationship between millinery and coiffure, following from the millinery piece featured in (Marcel bobbed hairpiece hat), and now brings the considerations of ethnic difference to bear on her design. Afro hair brings user group specificity to the milliner, and the visor design is a resolution of function and style for both protection and display. Connoting the sartorial conventions of workwear headgear, rather than the nineteenth century colonial 'cricketer's' cap, or the twentieth century US 'baseball' peaked cap, McLean's 'Jamaican Olympic Visor' brings distinctively postcolonial meaning to the cultural profile of the heterotopic media space. Designing for the popular culture of Olympic sports, televised and broadcast to global audiences, brings new forms of agency to the fashion designer, and McLan's design deploys a style that is widely recognisable from other popular culture's film and TV depictions of workwear to mark the distinctive tradition of supremacy that black athletes bring to the European traditions of cultural heritage. Supplanting the Arcadian 'laurels' with which winners are, traditionally, crowned, McLean's visor design innovation, suggests that it is not impossible to challenge and transform apparently timeless hierarchies of power and supremacy, so that ex-slaves may also become victors. McLean's fashion designs all work within this reach of fashion towards the carnivalesque inversion of social orderliness through play, display and sartorial activism.

O zambê é nossa cultura: o coco de zambê e a emergência étnica em Sibaúma, Tibau do Sul-RN

The coco de zambê is a dance of which origin is credited to old slaves who inhabited the coastalregion of Rio Grande do Norte. The zambê appears intensely in the narratives related to the past and present of Sibaúma, a quilombola community located in the southern coast of the state. It is conceived as a sign of ethnicity linked to a local black ancestry. The group is known as "remnant of Quilombo," and is demanding the process of territorial settlement, as guaranteed through the Brazilian federal constitution. The coco de zambê, presented as a kind of "certificate of ancestry to the group, besides, after a long period of abandonment, the dance is beeing "revitalized" and exploited by a part of the group alongside the demands for recognition. In this process there are several interlinked actors: NGOs, state agencies to promote the culture, representatives of public authorities and local leaders. Here, I'm interested in understanding how this process of revival occurs with the coco de zambê in Sibaúma: how a "brincadeira" (play) of the ancients comes to be a "cultural reference" and a means of political mobilization concerning their recognition