Summary: <p><a href="https://www.fws.gov/refuge/great_dismal_swamp/">The Great Dismal Swamp</a> is a remarkable feature of the southern coastal plain. Spanning from Norfolk, Virginia to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the Swamp is now a National Wildlife Refuge home to Bald cypress, black bears, otters, and over 200 species of birds, among many other critters.</p> <p>But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the home to the ambitions of planters and businessmen who sought to transform the swamp into a plantation enterprise of rice, timber, and other commodities. It was also home to the enslaved individuals who labored to make those dreams a reality.</p> <p>Yet the natural landscape, combined with the circumstances of the white-owned companies who controlled the Swamp, created opportunities for the enslaved to resist their bondage, and even self-emancipate into the Swamp’s rugged interior.</p> <p>And like the <a href="https://anchor.fm/mountvernon/episodes/160--Recasting-Tackys-Revolt-as-an-Atlantic-Slave-War-with-Vincent-Brown-eellut">Jamaican Maroons </a>who sought security in the island’s central mountains, some enslaved Virginians found a city of refugee in the Great Dismal Swamp. These acts of resistance were, as today’s guest explains, a form of petit marronage in a region that experienced more continently than change from the colonial era to the eve of the American Civil War.</p> <p>On today’s show, <a href="https://web.uri.edu/history/meet/marcus-p-nevius/">Dr. Marcus P. Nevius</a> joins Jim Ambuske to discuss his new book, <a href="https://ugapress.org/book/9780820356426/city-of-refuge/"><em>City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1765-1856</em></a>, published by the University of George Press in 2020.</p> <p>Nevius is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island and a 2020 Washington Library Research Fellow. Ambuske caught up with him over Zoom as he was completing some research on the Great Dismal Swamp in the revolutionary era.</p> <p><strong>About Our Guest: </strong></p> <p>Marcus P. Nevius is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. His scholarship has received the support of a Mellon Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and the support of a research fellowship awarded by the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. He has also published several book reviews in the <em>Journal of African American History</em>.</p> <p><strong>About Our Host:</strong></p> <p>Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project. He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.</p>
