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The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean from the 16th through to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those enslaved that were transported to the New World, many on the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, were West Africans from the central and western parts of the continent sold by western Africans to western European slave traders, or by direct European capture to the Americas.<br/><br/>

The numbers were so great that Africans who came by way of the slave trade became the most numerous Old World immigrants in both North and South America before the late 18th century.  Far more slaves were taken to South America than to the north. The South Atlantic economic system centered on producing commodity crops, and making goods and clothing to sell in Europe, and increasing the numbers of African slaves brought to the New World.
Full-length illustration of a fashionably dressed flapper standing with one hand on her hip and a cigarette in the other hand.<br/><br/>

Flappers were a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.<br/><br/>

Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms. Flappers had their origins in the liberal period of the Roaring Twenties, the social, political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War I, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.
Malala Yousafzai, born 12 July 1997, is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.<br/><br/> 

She is known mainly for human rights advocacy for education and for women in her native Swat Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Yousafzai's advocacy has since grown into an international movement.
Russell Sturgis (1750 - 1826) was the second son of Thomas Sturgis, Jr. (1722-1785), and Sarah Paine, of Barnstable, Massachusetts. He married Elizabeth Perkins (1756-1843), daughter of James Perkins (d. 1773), on November 11, 1773. Her grandfather was the Boston merchant and fur trader Thomas Handasyd Perkins, with whom Sturgis apprenticed at age sixteen, then worked as a hatter and furrier. Sturgis served as lieutenant of the Boston regiment of the Massachusetts militia in August and September 1778, and from 1787-1792 served under John Johnston as first lieutenant in Boston.<br/><br/>

Sturgis's brothers-in-law, James Perkins (1761-1822) and Thomas Handasyd Perkins (1765-1854), were notable China traders. In 1795 Sturgis joined them in ownership of a new ship, the Grand Turk, which was sent to Canton in March 1796. When the Perkins brothers opened a branch office in Canton (now Guangzhou) in 1803, Sturgis invested substantially, and three of Sturgis's sons subsequently voyaged to China. In 1818 all three were involved in the opium trade as partners in the firm of James P. Sturgis and Company.<br/><br/>

Sturgis was also active in Boston public affairs. From 1790-1796 he was a fire warden; in 1792 he was elected to a committee to assess a smallpox outbreak; and he served as Boston selectman from 1796-1797 and 1799-1802. He represented Boston in the Massachusetts state senate in 1801, and ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for state senator in 1805.
Samuel Russell was born in Middletown, Connecticut on August 25, 1789, to Capt. John Russell and Abigail Warner. Russell was orphaned at the age of 12, did not receive any significant inheritance, and did not attend college. Instead, he began his career as apprentice clerk for a maritime trade merchant, Whittlesley & Alsop, in Middletown. It is there that Russell began learning his skills as a trader.<br/><br/>

In 1810, his apprenticeship having ended, he moved to New York where he hoped to prosper. In 1812, he joined Hull & Griswold, a merchant house, based in New York but established by investors with family ties in Connecticut. He began traveling on company ships as supercargo and soon began trading on a commission basis which enabled him to found his first company, Russell & Company, a commission trader for Hull & Griswold, in his hometown of Middletown.<br/><br/>

Attracted by financial prospects, Russell set out for China, an assured profitable venture. He arrived in Canton, China, in 1819, engaging in trade on behalf of the Providence firm of Edward Carrington & Company in various goods and products including opium, an extremely profitable activity despite being outlawed-yet protected by foreign forces.<br/><br/>

The profits made by Russell enabled him to found Russell & Company in Canton, China, in 1824. Dealing mostly in silks, teas and opium, Russell & Company prospered, and by 1842, it had become the largest American trading house in China. It kept its dominance until its closing in 1891.<br/><br/>

Russell withdrew from the company in 1836. He returned to America, and lived in his mansion in his hometown of Middletown, Connecticut, until his death in 1862.