Carrie Gibson presents The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas

For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the western hemisphere, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom. From the first African revolt in 1521 on the island of Hispaniola to the eighteenth-century Maroon Wars on Jamaica, and the revolution that gave Haiti its independence, this was the most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known.
In The Great Resistance, acclaimed historian Carrie Gibson recovers their dramatic stories in one sweeping narrative. Focusing on the thousands of acts of defiance that kept the flame of freedom alive, Gibson vividly chronicles the resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil’s abolition in 1888, the institution of slavery itself.
Carrie Gibson is the author of three works of history:The Great ResistanceThe 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the AmericasFor more than four centuries, enslaved people across the western hemisphere, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom.  (2026), The Great Resistance-The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the AmericasFor more than four centuries, enslaved people across the western hemisphere, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom.  (2019), and The Great ResistanceThe 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas, For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the western hemisphere, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom. (2014). Prior to gaining a PhD in history at the University of Cambridge in 2011, she worked as journalist for The Guardian and Observer in London. She is currently living in Seoul, South Korea.
Additional Materials

→ Full bibliography (PDF)

→ Read an author interview with the Guardian 

→ Read an extract on Lit Hub

→ The New History of Fighting Slavery (review in The Atlantic)

→ Watch an author interview on Book Breaks (Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History)

→ Watch an author interview on Story in the Public Square (PBS)