Due to health problems I haven’t been able to make any new posts for a while, so to fill that void I thought I’d highlight a recent post by Donald Schaffer at his blog “Civil War Emancipation” on the international nature of emancipation:
There is a tendency in Civil War studies to see the war through a domestic-only perspective, neglecting its international manifestations except to the extent they affected the war at home. This approach is understandable given the conflict largely was internal, pitting Americans against Americans, and the long tradition in United States history of American exceptionalism. Such parochialism also has affected the study of emancipation as well, although less so as professional historians have internationalized the history of slavery in recent decades, seeing the topic increasingly in the larger context of African slavery in the entire Americas. Fortunately, this trend also has led scholars more and more to see emancipation as part of an international process that started with the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s and lasted until Brazil was the last nation in the Western hemisphere to free its slaves in 1888.
