Details

ISBN-10: 1982145099
ISBN-13: 9781982145095
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publish Date: 05/31/2022
Dimensions: 9.40" L, 6.70" W, 2.10" H

African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

Hardcover

Price: $40.00

Overview

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.

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Reviews
"In a work of phenomenal scope and decades of research across three continents, Fischer delivers a masterpiece of cultural and demographic history. He gives deep grounding to the cliché of diversity in our past, and through a wealth of anecdotes and stories, shows that Africans and African Americans were the agents of the pluralism and syncretism that drove the development of early America. Every student of African American history will learn anew from this book, scholars and general readers alike. Rarely have American regions, the question of race, and the whole story of a society been captured so powerfully. It is a book to be mined for knowledge and savored with joy."–David W. Blight, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom and Sterling Professor of History, Yale University
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Details

ISBN-10: 1982145099
ISBN-13: 9781982145095
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publish Date: 05/31/2022
Dimensions: 9.40" L, 6.70" W, 2.10" H
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