In 1811, a plantation owner in Spanish East Florida signed a manumission paper, officially freeing his 18-year-old wife, a Senegalese woman. He assured Spanish authorities of her “nicety and fidelity” as well as her “good qualities." Her name was Anna Kingsley. Captured in the endemic violence of west Africa, Anna lived an extraordinary life.
The appeal of one strange object, which achieved dizzying popularity in my lifetime, and today lives on mostly for nostalgia, is not so difficult to explain. All you need to do is turn one on and wait.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.