African Americans In The Colonial Era: From African Origins Through The American Revolution

African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution

Over recent decades few topics of American history have beensubject to greater attention and more thorough revision thanAfrican Americans in colonial times. Acclaimed works by leadingscholars, relying on new bodies of evidence and writing from afresh, Atlantic perspective, have provided a broadened, morenuanced view of the topic. In this third edition of one of the mostpopular books in our American History Series, Donald Wright worksnew interpretations into a narrative that provides a clearunderstanding of the scope and nature of the early African-Americanexperience. Included are discussions of African Americans’African origins; the Atlantic slave trade, based on the latest datafrom an on-line Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; theorigins of slavery and race-based prejudice in the mainlandcolonies; the evolutionary formation of African-American culture;and the effects of the American Revolution on men and women ofAfrican descent, at the time and long thereafter.This third edition views African Americans in the BritishNorth-American mainland colonies more as their contemporaries did:as persons from one of the four continents who interactedeconomically, socially, and politically over a period of 180 yearsin a vast, vibrant, complex Atlantic world. It shows how themainland North-American society that resulted from theseinteractions reflected the mix of Atlantic cultures and how therepublic that a group of these people eventually constructed usedEuropean ideas to support creation of a favorable situation forthose in control, persons largely of European descent. The Africanand African-American men and women, whose forebears had addedgreatly to the region’s economic and cultural viability,found themselves in 1789 with the least benefit from the nationthey helped bring into existence.Of special value is the book’s bibliographical essay, anexpansion and updating of earlier versions that led the historianIra Berlin to label Wright “the historiographer of slavery inthe early period.”