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Charles Williams has always been one of the more overlooked members of the Inklings, and the continued neglect of his poetry and "supernatural thrillers" suggests that he is not likely to experience a dramatic increase in popularity anytime soon. Similarly, Russell Kirk is an American historian who will always be better known for writing The Conservative Mind in 1953 than for any of the dozens of short stories and novels he wrote, many of which deal with ghostly or supernatural themes. In fact, Kirk acknowledged Williams to be an important influence on his fiction; this influence is perhaps most evident in Kirk's final novel, 1979's Lord of the Hollow Dark. In this "Gothick romance," as Kirk described it, a group of pilgrims gathers at a dilapidated mansion in Scotland, at which various satanic rituals are performed in the week leading up to Ash Wednesday. The novel features ghostly apparitions, psychological and spiritual horror, and a mingling of the supernatural and material, all of which calls to mind Williams' first, unforgettable novel, War in Heaven. The neglect of both authors has led to a lack of interest in the obvious thematic links between these two books, which this paper is intended to address. Aside from these links, I shall also discuss how the authors' respective religious views contribute to their differing approaches to certain subjects, such as time and the nature of Hell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a dataset that contains information on the sales and valuations of enslaved individuals in New York and New Jersey from 1672 to 1856. The dataset includes 2,362 entries and provides details on the prices and characteristics of 3,378 enslaved persons. It is the first dataset of its kind for the Northern states and offers insights into the history of slavery in the region, including the demand for enslaved labor, the shift from imported to domestic slaves, and the growth of the enslaved population in the Hudson Valley. The dataset is valuable for researchers studying slavery in the North and for comparing it to slavery in the South. It is also useful for historians, genealogists, and local history researchers. The sources for the dataset include archival collections, online search engines, newspapers, dissertations, and secondary source publications. The data was compiled for research purposes and will be used in a forthcoming book. The dataset can be accessed through the Harvard Dataverse and is represented on Enslaved.org. The article is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. [Extracted from the article]

The article titled "Manumissions of Enslaved Persons Recorded in Registers of Deeds in Montserrat National Trust Archives" explores the historical records of manumissions, or the freeing of enslaved individuals, in Montserrat. The author discusses the significance of the Registers of Deeds, which served as the official record of legal documents related to property, including enslaved people. The article highlights the rarity of manumissions in Montserrat and notes the presence of copies of manumissions executed in Dominica. The dataset, which covers the period from 1722 to 1834, provides valuable insights into this aspect of Montserrat's history. [Extracted from the article]