During the late eighteenth century, a wide range of objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions crisscrossed the ocean. Furniture and ceramics; clothing and accessories; maps, prints, and public amusements—all circulated among diverse actors who wrestled with the political implications of these items. In this presentation we will examine the unique ways that transatlantic revolutionary things shaped how people understood contested concepts like equality, freedom, and solidarity. And, we will explore how these objects became a means through which individuals—enslaved and free, women and men, poor and elite—promoted, and sometimes tried to thwart, the realization of these ideals on the ground.
Ashli White is associate professor of history at the University of Miami. She is the author of Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale UP, 2023) and Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010). She 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.
