What is it about?
This is the story of a French-Swiss and German married couple who traveled throughout Europe and the Americas in the 18th century, encountering enslaved Africans, Native Americas, and Europeans of all sorts. Their story shows how the Atlantic World provide space where adventuresome couples could explore, hide, and experience unusual and revealing encounters with other Atlantic peoples. Their lives illuminate an underside of empire, where religious radicals fought against church authority, and each other to find and spread the truth, where spiritual, medical, and linguistic encounters occurred that many who promoted imperial conquest, slavery, and trade could not understand or control, and where wives disobeyed husbands to seek their own truth.
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Why is it important?
This works provides important individual perspective on many important structures of the Atlantic World (conquest, slavery, warfare, religious mission, etc.) and reveals the operations of an "underside of empire" involving men and women who challenged imperial, colonial, et al. authority. It won the 2014 Rawley Prize for the best book in Atlantic History awarded by the American Historical Association.
Perspectives
Writing this book and discovering the lives and worlds of these two troubled religious seekers and adventurers was an adventure itself, and many people who have read it seem to think that reading it is something of an adventure, as well.
Distinguished Research Professor Aaron Spencer Fogleman
Northern Illinois University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Two Troubled Souls, December 2013, University of North Carolina Press (publisher),
DOI: 10.5149/9781469608808_fogleman.
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