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The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory (The Driftless Connecticut Series & Garnet Books)

Amazon.com Price:  $14.67 (as of 06/05/2019 06:18 PST- Details)

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Description

In 1757, a sailing ship owned by an affluent Connecticut merchant sailed from New London to the tiny island of Bence in Sierra Leone, West Africa, to take on fresh water and slaves. On board was once the owner’s son, on a training voyage to be told the trade. The Logbooks explores that voyage, and two others documented by that young man, to unearth new realities of Connecticut’s slave trade and question how we could have forgotten this a part of our past so completely.

When author Anne Farrow discovered the significance of the logbooks for the Africa and two other ships in 2004, her mother had been recently diagnosed with dementia. As Farrow bore witness to the affect of memory loss on her mother’s sense of self, she also began a journey into the world of the logbooks and the Atlantic slave trade, eventually retracing a part of the Africa’s long-ago voyage to Sierra Leone. As the narrative unfolds in The Logbooks, Farrow explores the concept if our history is incomplete, then collectively we have forgotten who we are—a loss that is in some ways very similar to what her mother experienced. Her meditations are well rounded with references to the work of writers, historians, and psychologists. Forthright, well researched, and warmly recounted, Farrow’s writing is that of a novelist’s, with an eye for detail. The use of a wealth of primary sources, she paints a vivid picture of the eighteenth-century Connecticut slavers. The more than one narratives combine in surprising and effective how one can make this an intimate confrontation with the past, and a powerful meditation on how slavery still affects us.

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