Currents in Transatlantic History ─ Encounters, Commodities, Identities

Transatlantic historians are dedicated to analyzing the dynamic process of encounter and interchange among people on all sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Much discussion has surrounded the definition, geographic limitations, and temporal scope of transatlantic history defined primarily by a conceptual approach that focuses on the interconnectedness of human experience over the centuries in the Atlantic Basin.

The forty-ninth annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series—“Currents in Transatlantic Thought”—focused on a new approach to history that focuses on the complex process of interchange and adaptation beginning when Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans first came into contact and continues to the present day. The essays presented in this volume stem from those lectures to cover a variety of subjects, but each shares a unifying theme to understand the complexities of transatlantic history.

STEVEN G. REINHARDT, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, is the author of Justice in the Sarladais, 1770–1790 and, more recently, of Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary Périgord. He is also coeditor of four previous volumes in the Webb Memorial Lecture Series, including Transatlantic History.