HLAS annotation: Beautifully illustrated with richly detailed photographs, this book, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, traces the living heritage of locally made pottery in the English-speaking Caribbean. Patricia Fay combines her own expertise in making ceramics with two decades of interviews, visits, and participant observation in the region, providing a perspective that is technically informed and anthropologically rigorous. Through the analysis of ceramic methods, Fay reveals that the traditional skills of local potters in the Caribbean are inherited from diverse points of origin in Africa, Europe, India, and the Americas. [HLAS Contributor: Jorge Capetillo-Ponce]

HLAS annotation: When Britain took over Berbice (present-day Guyana) from the Dutch, it kept open the "fiscal," an agency that heard complaints from enslaved people claiming to have been victims of illegal treatment. This book explores the fiscal records to uncover the methods by which enslaved individuals survived in Berbice, and the ways in which they navigated relationships with enslavers. The author advocates for a subtler reading of enslaved agency - one not so strictly polarized between rebellion and accommodation. Instead, as these records show, issues such as family, religious tradition, and labor hierarchies created multiple pathways of negotiation between freedom and bondage. [HLAS Contributor: Daniel Livesay]

HLAS annotation: The rise of biodiversity in the 1980s as an interdisciplinary area of study that linked tropical biology with a host of scientific and global civic endeavors has a long history in the field of science and technology studies. In this tome, historian Megan Raby explores the historical roots of biodiversity science by linking Middle America (Central America and the circum-Caribbean basin) to the expansion of US military and economic actions in the region. Victory in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898 and US-led efforts to complete the Panama Canal ushered in a wave of biological research centers in what the author calls the "American tropics." US tropical research stations in the Dry Tortugas, Cuba, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica either currently or previously housed American-funded studies of tropical biology. Although today many are biological gardens run by national governments, the historical rise and spread of these centers moved in tandem with the extension of US empire. The breeding of pest- or fungal-resistant species of plants and vegetables benefited multinational food producers, and also informed research on how to curb the spread of infectious tropical diseases. Harvard, Tulane, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and other top US universities were keen on establishing a research and teaching presence in these stations. Thomas Barbour, Theodore Roosevelt, Howard T. Odum, William Beebe, and Edwin F. Atkins, among others, played key roles in getting these sites set up with scientific management to explore the flora, fauna, and industrial spin-offs that the American tropics portended. "The histories of these former sites of US science underline the fragility of tropical field research stations... but also suggest avenues of hope for the future" (p. 218). [HLAS Contributor: Joseph L. Scarpaci]

HLAS annotation: This book provides an in-depth study of musical life in Guyana; the author places the role of music within the context of Guyanese history as it evolved from a British colony to an independent nation and analyzes the resulting social, economic, and political reality. Notable is his treatment of Guyanese musicians in relation to the greater Caribbean and his discussion of the presence of Guyanese musicians throughout the world. [HLAS Contributor: Alfred E. Lemmon]

HLAS annotation: A much-welcomed compendium of shorter, concise entries on major topics and individuals in both the prehistoric and historic Caribbean. Contains snippets of research conducted in the region by nearly all the well-known scholars, past and present, with useful descriptions of the major islands, ceramic typologies and other artifact classes, social and ethnic groups, preservation entities, and figures who have devoted much of their careers to improving our understanding of the Caribbean's rich past. A must-read for students and scholars alike. [HLAS Contributor: Scott M. Fitzpatrick]