email: jamaican_sites(at)care2(dot)com
‘Given the strange power of Jamaica to erase its history . . .’ Jean D’Costa and Barbara Lalla in the Introduction to Voices in Exile, 1989. Day after day, as I continue to explore Jamaica's history, especially, though not exclusively, in the period between 1865 and 1944, I find many aspects of that history that seem to have disappeared - to have been erased, overlooked, forgotten, and even rejected. I am trying,in the websites I am creating, to provide at least a glimpse of a more extensive view of Jamaica's past than the somewhat blinkered and stereotypical view which has become all too commonly accepted in the last half century. My articles 1981-2009 - a growing, I hope, collection of articles and papers I have written on topics in Jamaican history. | Some thoughts on 'history': 'Without knowledge of the past, the way into the thickets of the future is desperate and unclear.' Lauren Eiseley, scientist 'The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.' A. Whitney Brown, U S comedian 'I found out that those folks in the history
books were real people. They didn't live in the past. They inhabited
the present, their present, and it was filled with problems and stress
and nastiness and decency and heroism – just as any time is.' Joy Hakim, teacher, writer, historian People in the past acted not in response to the way historians - armed with hindsight and the technologies of the statistician - define that world, but in response to the way they deemed it to be.' Peter McPhee, historian 'Written history is . . . the fragmentary record of the often inexplicable actions of innumerable bewildered human beings, set down and interpreted according to their own limitations by other human beings, equally bewildered.' Dame Veronica Wedgewood, historian 'Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.' H A L Fisher, historian |
'. . . your
websites direct attention on so many important areas of
Jamaican history which remain (but for your efforts) in obscurity.'
'EACH TIME I GO OVER YOUR WEB SITES I AM ALWAYS IMPRESSED BY
THE QUALITY OF THE RESEARCH . . . IT IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!'
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