Untold Histories of the Atlantic World

Podcast

Host: Tianna Mobley

Atlantic History

Atlantic history spans social, economic, political, and cultural history, as well as historical geography. It is the study of the ways in which ideas emerge in history, the forces that impel them, and the beginning of their life cycle. The history of the Atlantic world "has brought disparate worlds increasingly together into a single Atlantic entity."

The Atlantic has become a unit of historical analysis that allows scholars to investigate the histories of the four landmasses linked by the Atlantic ocean. According to Alison Games, Atlantic history is "a way of looking at global and regional processes within a contained unit," even though this region was not "hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world, and thus was simultaneously involved in transformations unique to the Atlantic and those derived from global processes."

Additionally, Games writes: "Atlantic perspectives deepen our understanding of transformations over a period of several centuries, cast old problems in an entirely new light, and illuminate connections hitherto obscured." Historians of the transatlantic slave trade, colonial societies in the Americas, and empires have long encompassed the Atlantic in their purview. In the 1970s, scholars emerged who consciously embraced an Atlantic lens, and twenty years later, we witnessed an explosion of Atlantic scholarship.

This podcast seeks to draw attention to the interconnectedness of the Atlantic World through analyses of untold histories. Within this framework, microhistories will be the primary focus, as they allow for close readings of case studies that provide nuance and complexity to the histories, and subsequent legacies, that have commonly been accepted as finished, comprehensive, and inclusive.

Podcast Overview

The “Untold Histories of the Atlantic World” podcast by Tianna Mobley presents academic research with an activist slant to foreground previously overlooked or oversimplified histories of African and Indigenous experiences throughout the Atlantic world. This podcast is concerned with the inherent dynamism of the Atlantic world and applies "Atlantic history" as a framework for exploring various networks of interactions.

The podcast addresses the underrepresentation of subaltern voices in the telling of Atlantic history. By emphasizing both nuance and connection, Tianna’s overarching argument is that these histories matter and were integral to the unfolding of Atlantic world processes in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The early histories of Indigenous and African populations have largely been absent from popular historical narratives or diluted to accommodate cherished chronicles of conquest, colonization, and Westernized conceptions of progress. Such incomplete and exclusive renderings of the past have lingering effects on history as an academic discipline, public historical memory, and socio-political discourse today. As the podcast’s host, Tianna invites scholars and activists to share their research, why these histories resonate with them personally, and how they impact public discourse on topics such as indigenous rights, racism, social justice, gentrification, and immigration.

The primary subjects covered by this podcast include migration/diaspora, race/racism, slavery, anti-semitism, and indigenous histories. These will be examined in the context of British, Spanish, French, and Dutch colonial projects in Africa and the "New World."

The podcast examines a variety of source material.

1. Visual: paintings, maps, photographs

2. Textual: primary source documents and secondary literature

3. Oral histories: Works Progress Administration