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This classic examination of the freedmen in the slave society of Barbados was first published in 1974 and has not been widely available for years. Reissued now with a new introduction by Melanie Newton that places the work in the context of the historiography of studies of Caribbean free-colored populations, this classic is now available to a new generation of scholars and students. The work remains the only treatment of the free people of color of Barbados from the earliest periods of the slave society to emancipation in 1834 and provides the most detailed discussion of the manumission process for any British West Indian society. Allowed certain rights and privileges not extended to slaves but denied others reserved for whites, the social status of the free people was ambiguous. Thus there was wide latitude for varying interpretations of what their position should be, but Handler shows how the freedmen's struggle for civil rights was a collective effort to maximize their free status and to avoid a position of permanent intermediacy between white and enslaved. Using the petitions and addresses written by the freedmen themselves, Handler contends that they neither challenged the notion of a class society nor attempted to deny the upper stratum those privileges commensurate with its rank. They argued that a hierarchically organized society should be based on that set of social and economic criteria that whites used in drawing distinctions among themselves. It was evident, however, that as long as the slave society continued to exist, the freedmen of Barbados would remain an 'unappropriated people', neither enslaved nor entirely free.

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First published in 1961, Jamaica Talk is a thorough study of the English spoken in Jamaica and, although intended for the general educated reader rather than the linguistic specialist, has a foundation of sound scholarship, which makes it an authoritative classic. The late Professor Cassidy was born and reared in Jamaica and collected most of the material for his book when he was attached to the University College of the West Indies as Fulbright research fellow. There are chapters on the composition of ""Jamaica talk"", on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. The book is an invaluable reference in all institutions that have language departments, and as a handbook for Jamaicans and for interested visitors to the island.

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The historic Hope lands located on the Liguanea Plain in the southeastern parish of St Andrew, Jamaica, and once the site of one of the islands earliest sugar estates, has had a long history of human settlements dating back to approximately 600 CE, the era of the indigenous Tainos. It was not until 1655, however, with the English invasion and seizure of Jamaica from the Spanish, that the Hope landscape developed into a thriving rural agrarian settlement. Generous land grants were made to the invading officers and later to immigrants from Britain and North America and from other Caribbean islands. Major Richard Hope came in possession of over 2,600 acres in the Liguanea Plain. Major Hope, unlike many of his counterparts by the 1660s, managed to establish a small sugar plantation, which developed by the mid-1700s into one of the islands largest, most productive and technologically advanced slave sugar estates. In the 1770s the estate became the property of the Duke of Chandos and his family until 1848, when the estate was dismantled. Over 600 acres were sold to the Kingston and Liguanea Water Works Company and the remaining 1,700 acres were leased to the owner of the adjoining Papine and Mona estates. Poor accounting and border surveillance enabled several persons to possess the land, which was later sanctioned by the Limitations of Actions Law. With the governments acquisition of the entire property in 1909, the Hope estate underwent remarkable changes in the twentieth century. By 1960 the Hope landscape was radically transformed from a sugar estate worked by hundreds of enslaved black people to a premiere urban centre of commercial, residential and educational land use.