A dogged U.S. scholar has upended the conventional wisdom about enslaved Africans in the New World by demonstrating that the first successful slave uprising in the Americas occurred in Panama, not in Haiti, as many have long believed.
Robert Schwaller, a University of Kansas historian, discovered new details about the Panama uprising at the General Archive of the Indies, a repository in Seville, Spain, devoted to the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Asia. The papers, including letters, royal edicts and court documents, shed new light on several groups of enslaved Africans in and around what is now the Panamanian province of Colón.