| Previews | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Previews | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

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In the essay that won the 2006 Louis Pelzer Award, Wendy Anne Warren tells the story of a rape—the rape of an enslaved African woman on an island in Boston Harbor in 1638. That assault, the outcome of an early attempt at breeding slaves in seventeenth-century Boston, calls our attention to the importance of African slavery and transatlantic connections to colonial New England. The fragmentary nature of the evidence raises larger questions concerning the nature of history itself. In seeking to re-create the life of an individual woman based on this singular incident, the author challenges the difference between fact and fiction, asking when speculation crosses the boundaries of scholarly history.

Many students of history are familiar with the story of how, at the beginning of the Civil War, Gen. Benjamin Butler of the Union army designated escaping slaves as "contraband of war." But historians have not previously considered how and why the term "contraband" leapt instantly into popular culture and became a crucial part of Americans' vocabulary of race and servitude during the war. Examining representations of contrabands in journalism, music, art, fiction, and other cultural forms, . . .

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