Rebecca J. Scott is Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Jean M. Hébrard is a historian at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.
It’s a brilliant book.
*Boston Globe*
A sweeping tale of a fascinating family and the complex history of
the African diaspora.
*Booklist*
Scott and Hébrard impressively spin the family’s web from documents
culled from local/national archives in the U.S., France, Spain,
Belgium, Cuba, Senegal, England, and Haiti. There are an Atlantic
map, a genealogical tree, and family pictures. They persuasively
argue the cross-national connections, as well as the fragility of
freedom and citizenship.
*Choice*
In this well-researched and readable family history, Scott and
Hébrard recount the remarkable story of the Tinchants across
generations and continents. As people of color, the Tinchants
struggled, survived, and flourished—in Senegal, Cuba, New Orleans,
Antwerp, and Paris; and through the Haitian Revolution, French
Revolution of 1848, the Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.,
and WWII in Europe… Navigating the turbulent political and social
waters of their various contexts, members of the Tinchant family
often found themselves in ‘delicate position[s],’ as in Joseph’s
attempt to sustain amiable contacts with the white customers of his
retail store in New Orleans at the height of the Civil War.
Throughout, the ‘family emerges as one with a tenacious commitment
to claiming dignity and respect.’ Scott and Hébrard’s rendering of
the Tinchant family’s story is historically enlightening and
inspiring.
*Publishers Weekly*
The pleasures of Freedom Papers unfold at various levels. It’s a
family saga, an excursion through the commercial circuitry of the
Atlantic world, and a compelling introduction to the great Age of
Emancipation. It’s also a historical whodunnit: who was ‘Rosalie of
the Poulard nation’? Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard trace the ties
created by Rosalie and her descendants, Atlantic survivors whose
ingenuity—combined with strategic access to pen, ink, and
notaries—gave them just enough archival salience to make this
telling possible. Scott and Hébrard are practiced experts at making
the archive speak.
*Kathryn J. Burns, author of Into the Archive: Writing and Power
in Colonial Peru*
With this riveting family story that takes us from
eighteenth-century Africa to twentieth century Europe, Scott and
Hébrard rewrite the history of slavery, race, and citizenship.
Freedom Papers is stunningly original and movingly told—an instant
classic.
*Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of
History*
Freedom Papers is a tour de force. In its pages, the Tinchant
family maintains an inspiring commitment to revolution and racial
pride from Civil War New Orleans to Nazi Germany. This book will be
welcomed by anyone eager to understand how our worlds connect
across boundaries of race, geography, and time.
*Lolis Eric Elie, writer, HBO’s Treme*
What wonders of African American history remain hidden in the
archives, waiting to be discovered. Long lost, Rosalie Vincent and
her family have been found. At last, Rosalie—she of the Poulard
Nation, of Saint-Domingue, Haiti, Cuba, and New Orleans—has come
home, to the historical record. Freedom Papers will be hailed as a
tour de force of dogged research and the most riveting and fecund
scholarly imagination.
*Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and
African American Research, Harvard University*
A wonderful, richly detailed history that leads the reader through
two centuries in the life of a single family as the individuals
within it spend their times on earth, struggling for security and
standing. Unusual scholarship, beautifully recounted.
*Sidney W. Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of
Sugar in Modern History*
Scott and Hébrard combine the painstaking work of archival
researchers with the vision and sweep of the best historians to
produce a marvelous multi-generational family saga that underlines
the power of our humanity in the face of history’s changes and
challenges. This is not a book only about an Afro-American family;
it is about us all.
*Stuart B. Schwartz, author of All Can Be Saved: Religious
Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World*
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