About the Book

Historian Ashli White explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, arguing that in the late eighteenth century, radical ideals were contested through objects as well as in texts. She considers how revolutionary things, as they moved throughout the Atlantic, brought people into contact with these transformative political movements in visceral, multiple, and provocative ways.
 
Focusing on a range of objects—ceramics and furniture, garments and accessories, prints, maps, and public amusements—White shows how material culture held political meaning for diverse populations. Enslaved and free, women and men, poor and elite—all turned to things as a means to realize their varied and sometimes competing visions of revolutionary change.

About the Author

Ashli White is associate professor of history at the University of Miami where she specializes in early American history, with particular attention to the connections between North America and the Atlantic World. To date, most of her research has concentrated on the political, social, and cultural history of the age of revolutions. She earned her BA from the University of Virginia, an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is the author of Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), which explores the far-reaching impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. 

Dr. White was the associate curator and co-author of the catalog for Antillean Visions, a 2018 exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum that charted over 500 years of Caribbean maps.