Book description
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.
Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at
Columbia University in New York. His books have been translated into 15
languages and give an idea of his range: Citizens: a Chronicle of the
French Revolution, Landscape and Memory
, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art,The
American Future: A History
and, most recently, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writings on
Politics, Churchill and My Mother.
His art columns for the New Yorker won the national magazine Award for
criticsim and journalism and his journalism has appeared regularly in
the Guardian and 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. Simon Schama
was awarded a CBE in 2001.
