Bibliography and Suggested Reading

Kru History
  • Brooks, George E. 1972. The Kru Mariner in the Nineteenth Century: A Historical Compendium. Liberian Studies Association in America.
  • Burroughs, Robert. 2009. "‘[T]he true sailors of Western Africa’: Kru seafaring identity in British travellers’ accounts of the 1830s and 1840s." Journal of Maritime Research 11, 51–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/21533369.2009.9668368. 
  • Crutcher, Megan. 2023. “‘For King and Empire’: The Changing Political, Economic, and Cultural Identities of Kru Mariners in Atlantic Africa, 1460-1945.” Journal of African History 64 (3). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000567.
  • Frost, Diane. 1999. Work and Community Among West African Migrant Workers Since the Nineteenth Century. Liverpool University Press.
  • Gunn, Jeff. 2021. Outsourcing African labor: Kru migratory workers in global ports, estates and battlefields until the end of the 19th century. De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
  • Martin, Jane. 1985. “Krumen ‘Down the Coast’: Liberian Migrants on the West African Coast in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 18 (3): 401–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/218646.

Liberian History
  • Banton, Caree A. 2019. More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic. Cambridge University Press. 
  • Burrowes, C. Patrick. 2016. Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea: A History of the Liberian People Before 1800.
  • Ciment, James. 2014. Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It. Hill and Wang.
  • Murray, Robert. 2021. Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization. University Press of Florida.
  • Reilly, Matthew, Caree A. Banton, and Craig Stevens. 2023. “Aspirational Architecture and AK-47s: Fragmented Violence in Liberia from Settlement to the Contemporary.” American Anthropologist 125 (2): 404–19. https://doi.org/10/gs76pj.
  • Reilly, Matthew, Caree A. Banton, Craig Stevens, and Liza Gijanto. 2019. “Back-to-Africa Archaeology and Heritage in Liberia." Nyame Akuma 92.

Black Maritime History/Archaeology
  • Bolster, W. Jeffery. 1998. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Harvard University Press.
  • Canizares-Esguerra, Jorge, M. Childs, and J. Sidbury. (Eds.). 2016. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade. University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Costello, Ray. 2014. Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships. Liverpool University Press.
  • Dawson, Kevin. 2018. Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Harvard University Press.
  • Monroe, J. Cameron and Akinwumi Ogundiran. (Eds.). 2012. Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa: Archaeological Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.
  • Smith, Robert. 1970. “The Canoe in West African History.” The Journal of African History 11 (4): 515–33.