A History of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2025

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NONFICTION CROWN AWARD

'Gripping ... remarkably wide-ranging' THE TIMES

• Will draw original research into a historical and commercial narrative - The people in this book were not only the last survivors of the ship but the last documented survivors of any slave ship - this is a detailed and wide-ranging account of the transatlantic slave trade from the perspectives of its survivors. - Two of the five subjects are identified here as Clotilda survivors for the first time (identified by Hannah through her research) - Particularly devoted to telling the stories of women survivors of the Clotilda, not least because most of the slave ship''s last survivors were women, but also because female Middle Passage voices generally have been thought to be lost.

Autorentext

Dr. Hannah Durkin is a historian specialising in transatlantic slavery and African diasporic art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Leeds Trinity University. She has taught at Nottingham and Newcastle universities, and recently served as a Guest Researcher at Linnaeus University in Sweden. She is an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile, which is working to memorialise the Clotilda survivors, and was the keynote speaker at Africatown's 2021 Spirit of Our Ancestors Festival founded by the Clotilda Descendants Association. She is the recipient of more than a dozen academic prizes, including a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.

Klappentext

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2025

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NONFICTION CROWN AWARD

**'Gripping ... remarkably wide-ranging'**THE TIMES

This is an immersive and revelatory history of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship of the Atlantic slave trade, whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.

The Clotilda docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860 - more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible and significant period in world history.

In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda's 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. Survivors follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship's 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile - an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston - to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee's Bend - a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.

An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography and social commentary, Survivors is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and its far-reaching influence on life today.

Zusammenfassung
WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2025SHORTLISTED FOR THE NONFICTION CROWN AWARD'Gripping ... remarkably wide-ranging' THE TIMES