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"One hundred years before the Hollywood film The Great Impostor, Alfred Thomas Wood roved through the momentous mid-19th century events, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to New England, Liberia, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the U.S. Mid-West and the South. He is the great "absquatulator." Posing as an Oxford-educated preacher in Maine and Boston, he claimed to be a Cambridge-educated doctor of divinity in Liberia. He spent 18 months in an English prison, then in Hamburg in 1854, he published a history of Liberia in German. Speaking in Montreal, he claimed to have been Superintendent of Public Works in Sierra Leone. Wood served the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois as an Oxford-educated Doctor of Divinity, then toiled in post-Civil War Tennessee during Reconstruction as a Cambridge-trained MD. Perusing the life of a resourceful but dubious "absquatulator," Frank Mackey wittily casts new light on vital mid-19th century events" --publisher's website.
About the author
Frank Mackey is author of three previous works published by McGill-Queen's University Press:
Steamboat Connections: Montreal to Upper Canada, 1816-1843 (2000);
Black Then: Blacks and Montreal 1780s-1880s (2004), and
Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760-1840 (2010). He has worked as a journalist in Alberta, Newfoundland, Montreal, Quebec City, and London (Eng.) and taught journalism at Montreal's Concordia University. He lives in Montreal. Aly Ndiaye, Alias
Webster, is a Montreal based Senegalo-Québécois rap artist born in Quebec City. A pioneer of hip-hop in Quebec, Webster has been on speaking tours in Universities in Canada and the United States on the creative use of French in rap music. His passion for history led him to get a university education in history and to speak widely on the presence Africans and of slaves in Quebec from the period of New France. He is author of one hip-hop writing manual and a children's book on the first African slave in Canada.
Summary
Alfred Thomas Wood was nothing and everything. One hundred years before the Hollywood film The Great Impostor, Wood, the Great Absquatulator, roved through the momentous mid-19th century events from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to New England, Liberia, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the US Mid-West and the South.
