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Article

Charles Dunlop, Clarence Eduardo  

Togarma Rodriguez

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born on 6 July 1919 in San Pedro de Macorís to Eduardo Maturino Charles and Alicia Dunlop. At the age of 21, he married Luz del Carmen Vizcaino, his wife until his death sixty-seven years later. The couple had six children: Carmen Mireya, Nelson Eduardo, Eduardo Aníbal, Mirtha Gladys, Minerva, and Altagracia.

He completed his secondary education at Santo Domingo’s old Escuela Normal and later enrolled in the Universidad de Santo Domingo, where in 1946 he graduated with a medical degree as part of a larger cadre of talented peers who were responsible for the advancement of medical sciences in the Dominican Republic. Among them were Mariano Lebrón Saviñón, Mario Fernández Mena, Simón Hoffiz, Adolfo Pérez González, Juan Read Encarnación, Julio César García, Napoleón Perdomo, and Jaime Acosta Torres.

Charles Dunlop believed in serving his people and making his medical skills available to every Dominican irrespective of means He ...

Article

Fergusson, William  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

, physician and governor of Sierra Leone, was born in 1795 in the West Indies. His father was a Scottish settler and his mother was African American. Fergusson received financial support from his father to advance his education. He enrolled in the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at only eighteen years of age, Fergusson graduated as a surgeon with his own license in December 1813. He then joined the British army and was certified by the Army Medical Board. Fergusson worked as a hospital assistant at a military hospital for two years. In 1815 Fergusson was assigned to the small British West African colony of Sierra Leone and moved to Freetown The governor of Sierra Leone Charles MacCarthy convinced the army to send him a trained surgeon especially since he needed medical services for Africans rescued by the British navy from slave ships and resettled ...

Article

Galvão, Cândido da Fonseca  

Eduardo Silva

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

also known as Dom Obá II D’África, honorary sublieutenant of the Brazilian army and abolitionist, was born in Vila de Lençóis, in the backlands of the province of Bahia, Brazil. His father (?–1877) was born in Yoruba-speaking West Africa and as a child was sold as a slave in Salvador da Bahia where he was baptized and given the name Benvindo. As a slave he had no right to a surname, but when he was later manumitted he adopted the surname of his former master (Da Fonseca Galvão), probably because it held great social prestige. Benvindo became a lifelong Catholic and learned to speak, read, and write Portuguese. After being manumitted, he married Maria de São José (?–1869), also a formerly enslaved African. In 1845 the couple joined the diamond rush to Lençóis where they had two children Cândido da Fonseca Galvão and Francisca Gil ...

Article

Hannibal, Abram  

Leyla Keough

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Whether bought by Russians at the slave markets of Constantinople, or by the tsar himself in the Netherlands, scholars agree that Abram, who was born in Eritrea and asserted that he was the son of an Ethiopian prince, entered Russia in 1700 and began his service with the Royal Court in 1705. Within two years Abram, who later adopted the surname Hannibal, had won the favor of Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, who became his godfather when he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. The newly baptized Abram Petrov served as the tsar's personal valet both in Russia and away from it during his military campaigns.

After nine years in service to the court, the tsar sent Hannibal to Paris for further education. In 1718 he joined the French army to gain access to the best military engineering program and during his service he was ...

Article

Horton, James Africanus Beale  

David Killingray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

West African medical doctor, army officer, and political writer born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the son of a liberated slave. He went to school and studied at Fourah Bay Institute with a view to entering the Christian ministry. However, along with two other men, he was selected in 1853 to study medicine in Britain with a view to returning to West Africa as an army medical officer. Horton studied first at King's College London and graduated from Edinburgh in 1859. He was very conscious that he was an African and adopted the name ‘Africanus’. Commissioned into the Army, he returned to West Africa, where he spent twenty years practising as a military doctor and occasionally serving as an administrator. He retired as a lieutenant‐colonel in 1880 Early in his career many of his white fellow doctors resented his role and they persuaded the War Office not to appoint ...

Article

Latimer, Lewis  

Ian Jones

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

African‐American scientist and inventor who worked in Britain. Lewis Latimer's parents were Rebecca and George Latimer, fugitive slaves from Virginia who gained their liberty in the free state of Massachusetts, where Lewis was born. Lewis served in the American Civil War (1861–5), after which he worked as an office boy in a patent law firm. His employers soon recognized his talent for drawing and made him head draughtsman. He married Mary Wilson (1848–1937) in 1873 and wrote a poem for his wedding, which he later published in his collection Poems of Love and Life.

When he was 25, Lewis invented an improved toilet for railway carriages, and in 1876Alexander Graham Bell hired him to produce the drawings he needed to patent the telephone. Lewis was later headhunted by the US Electric Lighting Company, and in 1882 was awarded a patent for a ...

Article

Magee, Eduardo  

Mariana Isabel Lorenzetti

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born in the 1860s, to parents whose names were not recorded. The exact dates and places of his birth and death are unknown. Marcos de Estrada (1979) writes that he was born in Buenos Aires on 25 March 1865 and died in 1935 in the same city. However, Pablo Norberto Cirio (2010) indicates 1868 as his birthdate, pointing to a misunderstanding of the date and place of his death, according to the Afro-Argentine records of the Comisión Permanente de Estudios Afroargentinos (Permanent Commission of Argentine Studies). Magee was able to finish his education thanks to his parents’ savings and later began preparing for his apprenticeship as a railroad engineer. During his youth, he worked as a machinist in the railway system until 1890 He then submitted an application to the Ministry of War under the direction of General Lavalle during the presidency of Juárez ...

Article

Seacole, Mary Jane  

Jane Robinson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Jamaicannurse, hotelier, entrepreneur, writer, and heroine of the Crimean War. She was born Mary Grant, but no official records of her birth or parentage exist; in her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), she stated her father to be a soldier of Scottish descent (possibly James Grant of the 60th Regiment of Foot) and her Creole mother to be the keeper of a Kingston hotel, Blundell Hall, and a well‐respected ‘doctress’, skilled in the traditional African use of herbal remedies. Her mother's guests and patients included British army officers garrisoned in Kingston, and Grant enjoyed a close relationship with the Army all her life. She had one sister, Louisa Grant (c.1815–1905), and a half‐brother, Edward Ambleton, who died during the 1850s.

Grant was educated by an elderly woman described in the autobiography as my kind ...

Article

Valle, María Remedios del  

María de Lourdes Ghidoli

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

nicknamed “capitana” and “Madre de la Patria” (Mother of the Homeland), was a military heroine during the Argentinian Wars of Independence. Rising to the rank of sergeant major of the cavalry, she was present during the Wars of Independence from the beginning, fighting and assisting the army of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata in its campaign in Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia) between 1810 and 1817. She was born in Buenos Aires in the second half of the eighteenth century. The details of her parentage are unknown, but according to her military record, she was a parda, one of the categories applied to the descendants of African slaves. She married and was the mother of two children, one of whom was adopted, although neither child’s name is known.

It is known that in July 1810 after that year s revolution of 25 May María ...