African Americans In The Colonial Era

What are the origins of slavery and race-based prejudice in the mainland American colonies? How did the Atlantic slave trade operate to supply African labor to colonial America? How did African-American culture form and evolve? How did the American Revolution affect men and women of African descent? Previous editions of this work depicted African-Americans in the American mainland colonies as their contemporaries saw them: as persons from one of the four continents who interacted economically, socially, and politically in a vast, complex Atlantic world. It showed how the society that resulted in colonial America reflected the mix of Atlantic cultures and that a group of these people eventually used European ideas to support creation of a favorable situation for those largely of European descent, omitting Africans, who constituted their primary labor force. In this fourth edition of African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution, acclaimed scholar Donald R. Wright offers new interpretations to provide a clear understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the nature of the early African-American experience. This revised edition incorporates the latest data, a fresh Atlantic perspective, and an updated bibliographical essay to thoroughly explore African-Americans’ African origins, their experience crossing the Atlantic, and their existence in colonial America in a broadened, more nuanced way.

When the first edition of this revolutionary book appeared in 1990, it seemed that the study of African Americans in slavery was out of temporal and geographical balance. Most of the time that slavery existed in the United States was the colonial period. Yet the focus of the study of American slavery - and indeed of the history of all African Americans before the Civil War - long had been on the institution as it operated in the Cotton South from about 1830 to 1860. African Americans in the Colonial Era served as an early corrective to that imbalance, and a broad wave of new historical literature on African-American colonial history has since emerged. Carefully revised and greatly expanded in light of that new scholarship, the second edition of this highly popular book also includes new topics such as African-Americans in colonial Louisiana and Spanish Florida. Readers will be taken through the totality of the early African-American experience, with material on west African culture; the Atlantic slave trade; the regional differences under which the institution operated; the rise of race-based prejudice; the role of African-Americans in the American Revolution; and the manifestation and evolution of the African-American family and community, the keystone to the formation of African-American culture.