African Americans And The Abolition Of Slavery
The story of these captive Africans has set the stage for countless scholars and teachers interested in telling the story of slavery in English North America. Unfortunately, is not the best place to begin a meaningful inquiry into the history of African peoples in America. Certainly, there is a story to be told that begins inbut it is neither well-suited to help us understand slavery as an institution nor to help us Americana grasp the complicated place of African peoples in the early modern Atlantic world.
For too long, the focus on has led the general public and scholars alike to ignore more important issues and, worse, to silently accept unquestioned assumptions that continue to impact us in remarkably consequential ways. As a historical signifier, may be more insidious than instructive.
The overstated significance of —still a common fixture in American history curriculum—begins with African Americans And The Abolition Of Slavery questions most of us reflexively ask when we consider the first documented arrival of a handful of people from Africa in a place that would one day African Americans And The Abolition Of Slavery the United States of America. First, what was the status of the newly arrived African men and women? Were they slaves? Something else? Were they shocked?
Were they frightened? Did they notice these people were black? If so, did they care? In truth, these Abolitioh fail to approach the subject of Africans in America in a historically responsible way. These questions also assume this web page the arrival of these people was an exceptional historical Amerocans, and they reflect the worries and concerns of the world we inhabit rather than shedding useful light on the unique challenges of life in the early seventeenth century.
There are important historical correctives to the misplaced marker of that can here us ask better questions about the past. As early as Mayblacks from the West Indies were already at work in Bermuda providing expert knowledge about the cultivation of tobacco.
There is also suggestive evidence that scores of Africans plundered from the Spanish were aboard a fleet under the command of Sir Francis Drake when he arrived at Roanoke Island in Inenslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina. Nearly years before Jamestown, African actors enabled American colonies to survive, and they were equally able to destroy European colonial ventures. These stories highlight additional problems with exaggerating the importance of Privileging that date and the Chesapeake region effectively erases the memory of many more African peoples than it memorializes. That Sir John Hawkins was behind African Americans And The Abolition Of Slavery slave-trading expeditions during the s suggests the degree to which England may have been more invested in African slavery than we typically recall.
Tens of thousands of English men and women had meaningful contact with African peoples throughout the Atlantic world before Jamestown. In this light, the events of were a bit more yawn-inducing than we typically allow.
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Virginia was part of the story, but it was a blip on the radar screen. These concerns about making too much of are likely familiar to some readers. But they may not even be the biggest problem with overemphasizing this one very specific moment in time. The worst aspect of overemphasizing may be the way it has shaped the black experience of living in America since that time.
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How we choose to characterize the past has important consequences for how we think about today and what we can imagine for tomorrow. In that light, the most poisonous consequence of raising the Th with is that it casually normalizes white Christian Europeans as historical constants and makes African actors little more than dependent variables in the effort to understand what it means to be American. But, of course, they were not.]
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