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Modern (1800 CE - 1950 CE)

Text of contract in English and Arabic. Explanation in source annotation.
Source

American and Zanzibari Trade Contract, 1841

This contract, one of few bilingual agreements that survive, illustrates the practical commercial system that Indian, Arab, and American traders developed on Zanzibar. The document outlines the quantity, quality, and price of the cloves being sold as well as their expected delivery date.

Ad for auction of ship's cargo. Description at link.
Source

Advertisement for the Auction of the Ann’s Cargo, 1827

This flyer advertises the Ann’s 1827 arrival in Salem, Massachusetts, after making one of the first American trips to Zanzibar.

Text of report. Transcription at link.
Source

Rockefeller Foundation Report Concerning the Yellow Fever Vaccine

The creation of the yellow fever vaccine turned out to be quite controversial. Many of these controversies are revealed in documents such as this summary of correspondence between Georges Stefanopoulo, a Pastorian microbiologist, and his colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York.

Headline of newspaper article "La fièvre jaune à Dakar - Il n’y a pas d’épidémie," explanation at link.
Source

"Yellow fever in Dakar – There is no epidemic"

This is an excerpt from an interview with Blaise Diagne, the Senegalese deputy to the National Assembly, published in Le Matin, one of the major national dailies in metropolitan France.

Photo shows three men in pith helmets with a device on a cart in the foreground. A small hut is in the background.
Source

Disinfection of Dakar houses with a Clayton Apparatus

This is a photograph from the collections of the Rockefeller Archive Center depicting a Clayton apparatus disinfecting African houses during the yellow fever outbreak of 1927. The image illustrates a number of transnational linkages that shaped the epidemic.

The page of a diary with hand writing on it
Methods

Analyzing Personal Accounts

Personal accounts, including memoirs, journals, diaries, autobiographies, and life histories, are important historical sources that help us understand the human condition. These are the stories we tell about our lives that usually portray a larger picture of a life in historical context.

An image on the cover of Dreams of Trespass featuring three women in Moroccan dress walking away down a hall decorated with aniconic ornament.
Source

Dreams of Trespass by Fatima Mernissi

Written by Moroccan feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood is a semi-fictional tale about a young girl growing up in a traditional Moroccan harem in the 1940s and 1950s.

Title page of Memoirs and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, with the subtitle "A Native African and a Slave" and dedicated to the friends of the Africans.
Source

Memoirs and Poems of Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (c.1753-1784) was an enslaved African American poet and author. Despite this, the work Memoirs and Poems of Phillis Wheatley was compiled and the memoirs themselves written by Margaretta Matilda Odell, a supposed "collateral descendent of Mrs.

The page of a diary with hand writing on it
Source

Original Manuscripts of Anne Frank

Born to a Jewish family in 1929, Anne Frank is most known for the diary she kept while in hiding from Nazi forces during World War II. The War broke out in 1939 when Anne was ten-years-old.

Photo of handwritten letter. Transcription and translation on source page.
Methods

Primer: Transnational Mobility and State Formation

Modern nation-states and transnational mobility – the movement of people, things, and ideas across borders – are two important subjects for historians to study. They are two fundamental features of the modern world and have influenced one another constantly over the last several centuries.