In 1686, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Atkins, Dorothy Spendlove, and their children, all of whom were half-siblings, along with some of their children' s other half-siblings and their children's father, boarded a ship headed from Barbados to England, where they would live out their lives. It wasn’t unusual for a plantation owner like John Peers to impregnate both his enslaved Black laborers and his white servant, but it was unusual for him to acknowledge his illegitimate offspring, baptize them, bring them and their mothers with him across the ocean, and provide for them in his will, all of which John Peers did. This week we look at the story of a Barbados family, not via its patriarch, but rather through the lives of the five women who bore his children – Susannah, Elizabeth, Dorothy, and John's wives, Hester Tomkyns and Frances Knights (née Atkins). Joining me in this episode is Dr. Jenny Shaw, Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, and author of The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The episode music is “Calypso Island - P5,” by Audio Beats, purchased under Pond5's Content License Agreement; the Pond5 license authorizes the licensee to use the media in the licensee's own commercial or non-commercial production and to copy, broadcast, distribute, display, perform and monetize the production or work in any medium. The episode image is “A representation of the sugar-cane and the art of making sugar,” by John Hinton, 1749; the engraving is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540.

Additional Sources:

• “On Barbados, the First Black Slave Society,” by Sir Hilary Beckles, Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society, April 8, 2017.
• “Barbados profile - Timeline,” BBC News, January 4, 2018.
• “Barbados: Local History & Genealogy Resource Guide,” Library of Congress.
• “Barbados parts way with Queen and becomes world’s newest republic,” by Michael Safi, The Guardian, November 30, 2021.
• “Inside Barbados’ Historic Push for Slavery Reparations,” by Janell Ross, Time Magazine, July 6, 2023.

Henry Christophe, one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution, was, from 1811 to his death in 1820, King Henry I of the Kingdom of Haiti, the first, last, and only King that Haiti ever had. This week we look at Christophe’s meteoric rise from being born enslaved on an island hundreds of miles from Haiti to fighting in the American Revolution to serving as a general in the Haitian Revolution to being king of all he surveyed, until it all came crashing down around him. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University and author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Maestro Walter's Brass Band, Final March - JEZI OU KONNEN,” by Félix Blume, from Death in Haiti; the audio is available under Creative Commons CC BY 3.0. The episode image is a portrait of Henry Christophe from 1816 by Richard Evans; the painting is in the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien; the image is in the public domain and is available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional Sources:

• “The Haitian Revolution Timeline,” by Kona Shen at Brown University, 2022.
• “The United States and the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804,” Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute, United States Department of State.
• “How Toussaint L’ouverture Rose from Slavery to Lead the Haitian Revolution,” by Kedon Willis, History.com, Originally posted August 30, 2021, and updated, August 18, 2023.
• “Inside the Kingdom of Haiti, ‘the Wakanda of the Western Hemisphere,’” by Marlene Daut, The Conversation, Originally published January 23, 2019, and update November 16, 2022.
• “Rare document sheds light on historical black queen,” The University of Central Lancashire, September 26, 2019.
• “Atlantic freedoms: Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the Age of Revolution,” by Laurent Dubois, AEON, November 7, 2016.
• “The Play That Electrified Harlem,” by Wendy Smith, Library of Congress.

If you were to head to Paris in the mid-eighteenth Century and ask for a restaurant, you might be handed a bowl of meat bouillon, prepared in such a way as to improve vigor and perhaps even sperm production. Restaurant referred first to the broth itself and then to the eateries in which men, and less frequently women, could eat said broth. As restaurant came to mean the luxurious establishment at one which could eat an elaborate menu of delicate food items prepared by talented chefs, sex stayed the menu, and restaurants and the city’s sex workers formed a mutually beneficial relationship to serve diners’ appetites. Even as restaurants jumped across the pond to the US, the correlation remained. As a word of warning, this episode may not be appropriate for younger ears. Joining this episode is Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves, Professor of History at the University of Victoria and author of Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Sugar Blues,” composed by Clarence Williams with lyrics by Lucy Fletcher; this performance is by Leonare Williams and her Dixie Band, recorded on August 10, 1922, in New York City; the audio is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress. National Jukebox. The episode image is a digitized image from "Tableaux de Paris ... Paris qui consomme. Dessins de P. Vidal," published in Paris in 1893.; the digital version is available via the British Library and is in the public domain.

Additional Sources:

• “When Did People Start Eating in Restaurants?” by Dave Roos, History.com, Originally published May 18, 2020, and updated August 20, 2023.
• “Revolutionary broth: the birth of the restaurant and the invention of French gastronomy,” by Joel Abrams, The Conversation, August 25, 2021.
• “Are Oysters an Aphrodisiac?” by Alicia Ault, Smithsonian Magazine, February 13, 2017.
• “Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker,” by Adee Braun, The Atlantic, January 15, 2014.
• “Segregating Restaurants,” by Kimberly Wilmot Voss, PhD, NY Food Story.
• “The Ornate Ice Cream Saloons That Served Unchaperoned Women,” by Jessica Gingrich, Atlas Obscura, June 22, 2018
• “History,” The Berghoff.
• “8 Restaurants And Bars Where U.S. History Was Made,” by Mercedes Kane, The Takeout, June 22, 2022.
• “National Statistics,” National Restaurant Association.
• “A restaurant wanting a ‘grown and sexy’ vibe bans diners under 30,” by Emily Heil, The Washington Post, June 10, 2024.