Reading roundup
Sylviane A. Diouf has a new book, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The slave ship Clotilda and the story of the last Africans brought to America. I took her class on African diasporas at NYU; she has since moved to the NYPL's Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Diouf's earlier book Servants of Allah: African Muslims enslaved in the Americas explores the extent and limits of cultural survival among those West African Muslims forcibly deported to Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America (here's a review).

Dreams of Africa in Alabama is also about cultural survival, of a group of young people, mostly from Dahomey, brought to Mobile Bay by a slave trader in 1860, over half a century after a provision of the United States Constitution had made importation of slaves illegal. After emancipation, survivors of the Clotilda, not having the means to fund a return to Africa, formed a free African community with institutions based in large measure on West African legal custom. The last surviving passenger of the last known U.S. slave ship lived until 1935; people alive in Africatown today (it exists still, now within the jurisdiction of the City of Mobile) remember him. Diouf's research is a large addition to the literature of U.S. slave narratives, which have so often focused on exceptional stories like that of Olaudah Equiano. The late nineteenth century, if not the reachable past, is much more accessible. I look forward to reading more when I can check the book out.

I note that this is a time frame much more common in Cuba and Brazil, where the clandestine slave trade lasted longer, and where brutal conditions created mortality rates among slaves much higher than in North America. I haven't run the numbers, but I would guess that the average African ancestor of a living Brazilian arrived in 1840, and of a living North American in 1780.I read Seth Lloyd's Programming the universe: a quantum computer scientist takes on the cosmos the week it came out (hmm, leaving the bookstore will make me less able to notice new releases like this), but found it this morning for $2 at the library book sale and bought it. In brief, the most correct computer model of the universe would be a quantum computer made up of all the particles in the universe. Therefore, the universe is a quantum computer. 200+ pages of implications.A post by Manjunath Vadiari at Theories on past events provides a warning about taking the migration histories that testing companies provide along with genetic markers too literally. It's easier to sell a heritage than a set of numbers (this is what most people are paying for after all), but the history can be inaccurate, especially at low resolutions and when few subclades have been defined (especially common outside Europe). Manjunath, a Malayali living in Hyderabad, tested as Haplogroup R1 (M173), one of Eurasia's most common Y chromosome haplogroups, and got a "personalized" message from Spencer Wells describing his ancestors' journey from Central Asia to Europe. More at The Radical Genealogist

From The Map Room: "UNAM’s Instituto de Geografía has made the Atlas nacional de México — the national atlas of Mexico — available online."

Chris at The Genealogue notes the genealogical implications of the Copyright Renewal Database. Before 1963, copyrights expired if the holders didn't renew them; therefore, most all family histories published before 1963 in the United States are in the public domain.