African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

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About African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded

Product Description 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. Review “An almost unimaginable breadth of research, information and ambition. . . . Drawing on extensive recent work by historians on the demographics of the slave trade, Fischer traces the multiple African sources of the waves of importations from the 17th to the early 19th century, offering a rich portrait of the variety of cultures and places from which captives came. . . . He has been hailed as an accomplished historical storyteller who can capture a general reader, and those skills are evident here.” -- Drew Gilpin Faust ― The New York Times"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"A magnificent achievement and a fitting companion to Fischer's earlier masterpiece, Albion's Seed. Along with the regional influences of the original British settlers to the founding of America— the Puritans, Chesapeake cavaliers, Quakers, and Scotch-Irish— we now have the many contributions of the diverse peoples of Africa to the rich and complex tapestry of American culture.  Based on an immense amount of research, this powerful work of history transcends all our current historiographical debates over slavery." -- Gordon Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution and the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University"A monumental achievement in several senses of the term.  Fischer shows how a gifted historian, at the peak of his powers, reframes the current debate over the role of slavery and race in American history.  He does so by becoming a fully informed witness rather than a politically informed judge.  Here the larger truth of our origins as a biracial society is not lost, but found, in the details." -- Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents"Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Fischer delivers an exhaustive, multidimensional work about th