Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
(27 June 1929 - )
is a prominent historian and public intellectual who focuses on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Louisiana (United States), and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering a cache of extensive European colonial records in Louisiana, she created a database of records of over 100,000 enslaved Africans.
It has become a prominent resource for historical and genealogical research of African Americans. In addition to earning recognition in academia, Hall has been featured in the New York Times, People Magazine, ABC News, and other popular outlets for her contributions to scholarship, genealogy, and the critical reevaluation of the history of slavery.[1]
Midlo Hall is an award-winning author and Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History, Rutgers University, New Jersey. She is also an International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Institute for the Study of Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University, Toronto, Canada.
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Her work Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992) traced to original cultures the various ethnic African origins of enslaved Africans. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught in the United States.
She traced Africans to specific cultures of the continent, and added to scholarly understanding of the multicultural and diverse origins of American culture. She was able to demonstrate distinct patterns of settlement and re-Africanization of Louisiana, resulting in its unique culture in the American South.