(Posted November 16, 2015)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- The War of Jenkins' Ear was nine-year long conflict between Britain and Spain, allegedly spurred by the removal of an ear from the head of British merchant captain Robert Jenkins by the Spanish Coast Guard. Jane Landers, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, will discuss the politics involved in this eighteenth-century skirmish in the talk "Spanish Corsairs of 'Broken Color' in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 18, in Neff Lecture Hall in the von Liebig Center for Science.

The talk will be free and open to the public.

Jane Landers will speak on "Spanish Corsairs of 'Broken Color' in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 18, in Neff Lecture Hall in the von Liebig Center for Science.

A corsair, also known as a privateer, is a privately owned ship hired by governments to attack vessels during wartime. In her lecture, Landers' will utilize primary-source petitions by multiracial Spanish corsairs, correspondence and military reports by Spanish officials, and British Admiralty Court records to give an idea of the politics involved in the Atlantic skirmishes between Spain and Britain.

The presentation is sponsored by the McQuaide Distinguished Lectureship, a series of historical lectures established in 1997 in honor of Delbert J. McQuaide '58.

Landers specializes in the history of colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World, and the history of Africans and their descendants in those places.

Her book "Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions" was awarded the Rembert Patrick Book Award. Landers is the recipient of numerous awards and has authored and edited multiple publications, including the textbook "A History of the Atlantic World, 1400-1888."

Landers is the director of the Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies, a project that digitally preserves hundreds of thousands of documents related to Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Americas. Documents in the projects' archives date back to the sixteenth century and hail from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Spanish Florida.

By: Tyler Ayres '16

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.