many surprises, this put me in mind of a phrase formed by a very it would it american historian, lawrence levine, in which he talked about the unpredictable past. it is a great phrase. what i found was that the pastor of the amistad was extremely unpredictable, as to what i would like to share with you today are some of the surprises. what were the surprises of doing this kind of research? the first surprise, and then some ways the biggest surprise and the one that made many subsequent surprise is possible has to do with the sources, the quantity and the quality of evidence about these africans who made the revolt. i spent 30 years studying slavers, enslaved africans, poor people who left almost no documents of their own, so i was trained to do this kind of work, try to write history from below. people who had been left out of most of the historical narrative . the bus tell you, the body of evidence available about this case, i am convinced, is the richest of the deepest of any i have ever seen pump in the group of enslaved rebels anywhere. it is a staggering body of evidence. when i came to stu