Participant Info

First Name
Marjoleine
Last Name
Kars
Country
United States
State
DC District of Columbia
Affiliation
UMBC (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County
Website URL
https://history.umbc.edu/facultystaff/full-time/marjoleine-kars/
Keywords
Early Modern Atlantic world, Early America, American Revolution, Dutch empire, slavery, gender, Berbice
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I teach courses in Early American history, Atlantic History, and Women’s History. I am an affiliate faculty member in Gender and Women’s Studies (GWST). I served as Chair of the History Department from 2011-2018. I am a senior editor for International Labor and Working Class History.

My book about a massive and nearly successful slave rebellion in Berbice, a Dutch colony (now the Republic of Guyana) in South America, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast was published in 2020 with The New Press and in Dutch with Atlas Contact. It won the 2021 Cundill History Prize and the 2021 Frederick Douglass Prize.

An article about this work, “Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763,” was published in the American Historical Review in Feb. 2016. 

Together with Michael McDonnell and Andrew Schocket, I am editing a three-volume The Cambridge History of the American Revolution.

I am currently working on a joint biography of two well-traveled African men who were caught up in Dutch slavery and colonialism during the Age of Revolution (1760-c. 1820).

Previously, I published Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

 

Recent Publications

Bloed in de Rivier: Het onbekende verhaal van de massale slavenopstand in een Nederlandse kolonie (Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2021)

“Opstand in Berbice,” in Pepijn Brandon, Guno Jones, Nancy Jouwe en Matthias van Rossum, Eds., De slavernij in Oost en West: Het Amsterdam Onderzoek (Amsterdam: Het Unieboek/Spectrum, 2020), 225-233.

Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New York: The New Press, 2020)

“Reckoning with slavery: What Berbice rebellion archives tells us about who owns the past,” The Conversation, Dec. 1, 2020 (online)

“Dodging Rebellion: Women and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763,” American Historical Review 121, 1 (Feb. 2016), 39-69.

“Opting Out,” The American Revolution Reborn issue, COMMON-PLACE 14, 3 (Spring 2014).

“’Wij beleeven hier droevige tyden’: Europeanen, Indianen en Afrikanen in de Berbice Slavenopstand, 1763-1764,” in Victor Enthoven, Henk den Heijer, Han Jordaan, eds., Geweld in de West: Een militaire geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Atlantische wereld, 1600-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 183-216.

“Maroons and Marronage,” In Oxford Bibliographies Online: The Atlantic World.   Trevor Burnard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, updated 2016.

Media Coverage
https://www.cundillprize.com
Country Focus
US, Atlantic World, Dutch colonies, Dutch Republic, Guyana
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, Caribbean, Netherlands, North America, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
18th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
American Revolution, Colonialism, Gender, Labor, Rebellion & Revolution, Slavery, Women