Junkanoo celebration in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. Junkanoo is a street parade with music, dance, and costumes across the Bahamas every Boxing Day (December 26) and New Year’s Day (January 1). *Photo from Wikipedia
July 10 is Independence Day, celebrates the independence of the Bahamas from the United Kingdom in 1973.
The Bahamas became a British Crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy.
After the American War of Independence, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists in the Bahamas; they brought their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. Africans constituted the majority of the population from this period. The Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves: the Royal Navy resettled Africans here liberated from illegal slave ships; American slaves and Seminoles escaped here from Florida; and the government freed American slaves carried on United States domestic ships that had reached the Bahamas due to weather.
Slavery in the Bahamas was abolished in 1834.
The Bahamas became an independent Commonwealth realm in 1973, retaining Queen Elizabeth II as its monarch.
The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, is an archipelagic state of the Lucayan Archipelago consisting of more than 700 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, and is located north of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, southeast of the United States state of Florida, and east of the Florida Keys.
*Reference: Wikipedia
