Author Archives: Jessica DeJohn Bergen

I recently published a review of War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles on H-Borderlands.  I thought my review of Gilbert C. Din’s book might be interesting to some of our readers here.

During his presidential address to the 2011 Louisiana Historical Association meeting, Gilbert C. Din described a long series of chance encounters and events that led to the “accidental Louisiana historian” he is today. Din’s unintended journey started as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began his training in Latin American historiography, but was uninterested in historian Herbert E. Bolton’s borderlands. Continue reading →

Gregory Wigmore, doctoral candidate at University of California at Davis, looks at how slaves of British Loyalists traversed both boundaries of nation-state and enslavement to secure manumission.  Wigmore begins his essay with a slave woman and her son escaping enslavement from an attorney in Upper Canada.  Similar to the process and dynamic of Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad, the mother and son board a small boat and flee Sandwich by way of the Detroit River to Detroit.  His compelling introduction, illuminates slave negotiation of the borderlands in order to attain freedom.  Wigmore situates his historical characters and many others in the greater historiography of slavery by suggesting their absence from the historical narrative and asserts that runaway slaves “played a significant role in the hardening of that boundary.” (p.438) Wigmore claims historians have traditionally looked at slave flight from the U.S. to Canada not the reverse.  Continue reading →