African Founders
How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States.
African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new, distinctly American culture.
Drawing on decades of research, some of it in western Africa, Fischer recreates the diverse regional life that shaped the early American republic. He shows that there were varieties of slavery in America and varieties of new American culture, from Puritan New England to Dutch New York, Quaker Pennsylvania, cavalier Virginia, coastal Carolina, and Louisiana and Texas.
This landmark work of history will transform our understanding of America’s origins.
Customer Reviews
Decent history, bad perspective
This book was interesting and seems well researched…however the author blithely skims over any opportunity for analysis of the effects of capitalism and white supremacy, refusing to question the former and gesturing vaguely at the latter. Many of his conclusions reinforce racist ideas of essentialism, rather than examining peoples reactions to the circumstances they were in. He talks about Americans being a people on the move, and laments the recent slowing of that trend…not acknowledging that westward expansion, Indian removal, and the Great Migration were all the direct result of the rising effect of white supremacy and thus calls into question any reason for grieving a change in those trends. For a book purporting to be about Africans, this book has a strangely racist viewpoint.
Thank you :)
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