The following is a guest post by John Garrison Marks, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In his dissertation, “Ports of Freedom: Race and Respectability in the Urban Black Atlantic,” he examines how free people of color in the United States and Spanish America engaged in an Atlantic discourse on race, freedom, and respectability in their efforts to mitigate the impact of racial discrimination on their daily lives. One of the advantages of studying the Atlantic World is the opportunity to find historiographical links not recognized by others. I’ve noticed recently that Read more