Rough Crossings

Schama, Simon.

ISBN 10: 0563493658 / ISBN 13: 9780563493655

Published by BBC Books, 2006

About this Item

Seller Inventory # U9780563493655

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Rough Crossings
• Publisher: BBC Books
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0563493658
• ISBN 13: 9780563493655
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1751798915.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: 47100182
• Signed: 7/6/2025 10:48:35 AM
• Seller catalogs:
  • 5
  • U
  • 9780563493655

About this title

Synopsis

Rough Crossings is the astonishing story of the struggle to freedom by thousands of African-American slaves who fled the plantations to fight behind British lines in the American War of Independence. With gripping, powerfully vivid story-telling, Simon Schama follows the escaped blacks into the fires of the war, and into freezing, inhospitable Nova Scotia where many who had served the Crown were betrayed in their promises to receive land at the war's end. Their fate became entwined with British abolitionists: inspirational figures such as Granville Sharp, the flute-playing father-figure of slave freedom, and John Clarkson, the 'Moses' of this great exodus, who accompanied the blacks on their final rough crossing to Africa, where they hoped that freedom would finally greet them.

About the Author

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. His award-winning books, translated into fifteen languages, include Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, The American Future and The Story of the Jews.

His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented forty films for BBC2 on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy, American politics and John Donne and won an Emmy for The Power of Art.