Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

By James H. Sweet

320 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 illus., 5 maps, 4 tables, notes, bibl., index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-0975-1
    Published: August 2013
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-4001-1
    Published: February 2011
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7804-0
    Published: February 2011

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Awards & distinctions

2012 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

2011 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History, American Historical Association

A 2011 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Álvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time--from Africa to South America to Europe--addressing the profound alienation of warfare, capitalism, and the African slave trade through the language of health and healing. In Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, James H. Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected.

About the Author

James H. Sweet is Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. His book Recreating Africa won the American Historical Association's 2004 Wesley Logan prize for the best book on the history of the African diaspora.


For more information about James H. Sweet, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A fine, well-constructed and cogently argued piece of microhistory." —The Americas

"This book should become mandatory reading for graduate students as well as faculty working on Atlantic history. . . . The skillful prose of this work also should be a model for other historians." —Journal of World History

"[This book] will be of significant interest to specialists of the Atlantic World, particularly those of the Black Atlantic, and will likely generate lively discussions in graduate seminars." —Register of The Kentucky Historical Society

"Sweet offers not only a glimpse into the intellectual life of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world but perhaps even an epistemological model for the struggles of our own time." —HAHR

"[A] laudable and exemplary new study. . . . This richly detailed account will be considered among the best of a generation of Black Atlantic histories." —International Journal of African Historical Studies

"Demonstrates an interesting, well-written, and rigorous methodological approach to studying the commonalities of the life and politics of Domingo Álvares. . . . Sweet has produced a comprehensive examination of the African diaspora with emphasis on the Black Atlantic.” —The Historian