Julia Gaffield on Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind

Adam McNeil interviews Georgia State University historian Julia Gaffield about the legacy and ongoing influence of Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. Julia Gaffield is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the early independence period in Haiti with an emphasis on connections between Haiti and other Atlantic colonies, countries, and empires in the early nineteenth century. She’s the author of the 2015 book Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution and the editor of the 2016 volume The Haitian Declaration of Independence. Her current projects include a biography of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and a history of Haiti and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. Her article, “The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty,” appears in the June 2020 issue of the AHR as part of the forum “Haiti in the Post-Revolutionary Atlantic World.” The issue also includes a review roundtable that considers Scott’s The Common Wind. Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD student in the Department of History at Rutgers University where his research focuses on the experiences of Black fugitive women during the American Revolutionary era as well as on histories of Appalachian mountain slavery and labor histories in the nineteenth century. McNeil is a regular contributor to the academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, and host of the podcast New Books in African American Studies.