Vincent Brown traces ‘Tacky’s Revolt’ during A.R.T. salon series
History typically is written by the victors. But in his new book, “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War,” Vincent Brown gives this something of an ironic twist. The Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies reads between the lines of the records and correspondence of colonial military leaders and plantation owners to get into the minds of those on the other side of the largest rebellion of enslaved people in the 18th-century British Empire. Over the course of about a year starting in 1760, more than 1,000 in Jamaica rose up in a series of insurrections that Brown views not as isolated acts, but as operations in a wider guerrilla war against colonial slavery. Using cartography and military analysis, he traces the revolt, its leaders, and it suppression from the Gold Coast of Africa to Jamaica. On Monday, Brown will...