African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (The American History Series)

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-about two-thirds of it-was the colonial period. Yet the focus of the sudy 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 wholly new topics such as African Americans in colonial Louisiana and Spanish Florida. The reader 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.