Irish dockworkers: Michael C. Connolly, “Black Fades to Green: Irish Labor Replaces African-American Labor Along a Major New England Waterfront, Portland, Maine, in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Colby Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2001): 357–73.
“hate strikes”: David M. Lewis-Colman, Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 15–16.
Bacon’s anti-Native fervor: Erin Blakemore, “Why America’s First Colonial Rebels Burned Jamestown to the Ground,” History.com, August 8, 2019, www.history.com/news/bacons-rebellion-jamestown-colonial-america; James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677),” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Bacon_s_Rebellion_1676-1677.
“English, and other white”: “An Act for Preventing Negroes Insurrections” (June 1860), in William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 2:481–82.
any indentured white servant: “Run-aways” (March 1661–62), ibid., 2:116–17.
“lift[ing] his or her hand”: “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (October 1705), ibid., 3:447–63.
stopped importing white servants: Theodore Allen, Class Struggle and the Origin of Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (Stony Brook, NY: Center for the Study of Working Class Life, 2006).
1679–1684: The Virginia Law That Forbade Bearing Arms
“happened one law at a time”: Africans in America (documentary), PBS, 1998.
“lift[ed] up his hand”: “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (October 1705), in William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 3:447–63.
“eighty Guns”: Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 389–91.
NRA lent its support: See Thad Morgan, “The NRA Supported Gun Control When the Black Panthers Had the Weapons,” History.com, March 22, 2018, www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act; Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
1684–1689: The Code Noir
“prohibited the exchange”: Gad J. Heuman and James Walvin, eds., The Slavery Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 199.
“one of the most”: Tyler Stovall, “Race and the Making of the Nation: Blacks in Modern France,” in Michael A. Gomez, ed., Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 205.
“the French American”: William Renwick Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” Journal of Negro History 10, no. 3 (1925): 321–29.
“salary and a portion”: Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718–1812,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1991): 176.
“since girls and women”: Ibid., 186.
1689–1694: The Germantown Petition Against Slavery
“are brought hither”: “Germantown Friends’ Protest Against Slavery 1688” (facsimile), Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.14000200/?st=text.
“one of the first documents”: Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 70.
1694–1699: The Middle Passage
“in human flesh and blood”: Malyn Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 156.
slowly eroded the Portuguese monopoly: Richard Bean estimates that the Portuguese exported nearly 100,000 sterling worth of gold annually in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century; see Bean, “A Note of the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports,” Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 351–56. See also Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 37–40; and Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 87.
number of enslaved people: The estimated number of enslaved men, women, and children from the Gold Coast rose from 2,429 in 1641–50 to 40,443 in 1691–1700. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/explore/voyages-the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade-database.
the ruler of Ardra: Carl A. Hanson, Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal, 1668–1703 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 243; C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 153.
“Axim, Ackum”: Peter C. W. Gutkind, “The Canoemen of the Gold Coast (Ghana): A Survey and an Exploration in Precolonial African Labour History,” Cahiers d’études africaines 29, nos. 115–16 (1989): 339–76.
“the bigger canoes”: Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, trans. George H. T. Kimble (1506; Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 116, 121, 122, 132.
“the fittest and most experienced”: Robert Smith, “The Canoe in West African History,” Journal of African History 11, no. 4 (1970): 517.
“It was customary for Mina fishermen”: Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea…(London: James Knapton and Dan. Midwinter, 1705), 344.
1699–1704: The Selling of Joseph
“October 12. Shipped”: “Samuel Sewall, Merchant,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 52, October 1918–June 1919 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1919), 335.
“been long and much”: Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, vol. 2, 1699–1700–1714 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1879), 16.
“these Blackamores”: Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700), 2–3.