African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

By David Hackett Fischer

Book Overview

In this sweeping, foundational work of American history, 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1982145099
• ISBN13: 9781982145095
• Release Date: May 2022
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 960 Pages
• Weight: 2.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.1" x 6.7" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Not as good as Albion's Seed

Disclaimer: This is not in support of slavery I just completed this book. While it is extensive, I believe it left out a good deal of history of how Southern slavery evolved into something more palatable (for lack of a better term) than early New England slavery or Caribbean slavery. I would cite Nehemiah Adams' eyewitness account of Southern slavery (A Southside View of Slavery) in his visit to Georgia, or Mary Chestnut's diary and description of her "servants" and the familial relationships, in the South, between blacks and whites. The author did point out that slavery was complex, that slaves in deed did enjoy some rights, and that they were not the "poor victims" (again, for lack of better words) that modern historians have portrayed them to be. They set up governments among themselves, at times chose their masters, had caste systems among themselves (ie. house slaves vs. field hands) and that more than a few became prosperous, educated, and independent, thanks to their masters, and despite what modern historians tell us. It is a good read, though, and will change what you know, or think you know, or have been taught, about slavery