C. Patrick Burrowes
Born to Jamaican parents in Liberia and educated in the United States, I bring to my research and teaching a deep appreciation of world cultures.
I grew up surrounded by mangoes, guavas, soursops, breadfruits, pawpaws, and bananas, with the constant aroma of coffee from the roastery operated by my parents. Our home stood in the shade of an awe-inspiring cotton tree, inhabited by bats and, according to neighborhood lore, a colony of ghosts.
With television unavailable in Liberia until 1960, childhood was filled with the sounds of radio, everything from hourly newscast on the BBC World Service through weekly Davy Crockett audio dramas. What began as a passion for poetry in high school, led to the practice of journalism, then to an interest in historical research.
A defining moment occurred in 1980, when I was a young freelance writer and a lecturer at the University of Liberia, charged with responsibility for developing a journalism curriculum within the English Department. While driving from the telex bureau in Monrovia, where I had just filed stories to several London-based magazine on the recent overthrow of the civilian government of Liberia by a military junta, I suddenly found myself facing a drunken soldier who was accusing me of disloyalty to the new regime.
The experience of staring down the barrel of an M-16 rifle served to deepen my commitment to free expression and further my interest in understanding the conditions that serve to further or constrain civil liberties.
Most of my research and scholarship activities relate to investigating press freedom and media history, as well as the intersection of ideology and power in communication.
Phone: 717.948.6466
Address: 777 West Harrisburg Pike, W356
Middletown, PA 17057
I grew up surrounded by mangoes, guavas, soursops, breadfruits, pawpaws, and bananas, with the constant aroma of coffee from the roastery operated by my parents. Our home stood in the shade of an awe-inspiring cotton tree, inhabited by bats and, according to neighborhood lore, a colony of ghosts.
With television unavailable in Liberia until 1960, childhood was filled with the sounds of radio, everything from hourly newscast on the BBC World Service through weekly Davy Crockett audio dramas. What began as a passion for poetry in high school, led to the practice of journalism, then to an interest in historical research.
A defining moment occurred in 1980, when I was a young freelance writer and a lecturer at the University of Liberia, charged with responsibility for developing a journalism curriculum within the English Department. While driving from the telex bureau in Monrovia, where I had just filed stories to several London-based magazine on the recent overthrow of the civilian government of Liberia by a military junta, I suddenly found myself facing a drunken soldier who was accusing me of disloyalty to the new regime.
The experience of staring down the barrel of an M-16 rifle served to deepen my commitment to free expression and further my interest in understanding the conditions that serve to further or constrain civil liberties.
Most of my research and scholarship activities relate to investigating press freedom and media history, as well as the intersection of ideology and power in communication.
Phone: 717.948.6466
Address: 777 West Harrisburg Pike, W356
Middletown, PA 17057
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The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXXIV, No. 1, February 2018
154 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
broader context and wide scope of Teage’s work. By drawing attention to Teage, a neglected figure in Liberian historiography, Burrowes wants to encourage a more complex understanding of Liberia’s founding generation, but the book does more than that. In Burrowes’s extensive introduction, he reintroduces Teage as a central figure in the history of black nationalism and argues for a sea change in the historiography of nineteenth-century African American intellectual culture in the black Atlantic.