Congratulations you have made it to the final week. This forum will review the last 7 weeks and discuss the present impact that this history has on our nation and on the modern African American cultur

CHAPTER 1 The First Passage 1502– 1619 Colin A. Palmer Without exception, the contemporary societies of North and South America and the Caribbean include peoples of African descent. They form the numerical majority in the Caribbean, are about one half of Brazil’s population, and make up a significant minority in the United States. In other countries, such as Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia, blacks are present in smaller numbers. Regardless of the societies in which they live, these peoples share a common historical origin and ancestral homeland. Their experiences in the Americas have also been remarkably similar since the sixteenth century, when they began to arrive from Africa in everincreasing numbers. Black Africans were brought as slaves into the Caribbean islands and the mainland colonies of Central and South America, first by the Spaniards and later by the Portuguese. Beginning in 1502, the slave trade gathered momentum as white colonists came to rely on this forced black labor. During the early years of the trade, Africans passed through Spain (where many remained) to the Americas. By 1518, however, a direct trade route from Africa to the Americas was introduced. Not all Africans in the Americas, even in the sixteenth century, served as slaves for the duration of their lives. Some managed to achieve their freedom; others were born free. In 1617 the first town or settlement controlled by free blacks in the Americas was established in Mexico. This was a major development in black life in the Western Hemisphere; it was the first time that a group of Africans gained the right to live as free people. These pioneers had successfully thrown off the yoke of slavery through their own efforts, setting the stage for the eventual liberation of other enslaved Africans. But almost three centuries passed before this goal would be accomplished everywhere in the Americas. Two years after this free Mexican town— San Lorenzo de los Negros— received its charter, about twenty Africans disembarked from a Dutch ship at Jamestown, Virginia. These people were the first Africans shipped to the new and permanent settlement that the English colonists had established in North America. They came 117 years after Africans were first enslaved in the Americas, in Hispaniola. From Africa to the Americas Modern archaeological research has established that Africa was the birthplace of human life. No precise date can be given for the emergence of early humans, or the hominid species, but it may have taken place about two million years ago. The earliest of these hominid fossils were
To Make Our World Anew : Volume I: A History of African Americans to 1880, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=422450.
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CHAPTER 2 Strange New Land 1619– 1776 Peter H. Wood In the summer of 1619, a 160-ton ship from the port of Flushing in Holland sailed into Chesapeake Bay. This Dutch vessel was under the command of Captain Jope and piloted by an Englishman named Marmaduke Raynor. They were seeking to obtain provisions after a season of raiding in the West Indies. In exchange for supplies, Jope and his crew sold more than twenty Negroes to the local authorities in the struggling English colony of Virginia. These black newcomers came ashore twelve years after the founding of Jamestown and one year before the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth in New England. The people brought to Virginia by the Dutch man-of-war are often cited as the first persons of African ancestry to set foot on North America. But, in fact, others had come before them and had traveled widely through the southern part of the continent. Africans were present in the early Spanish forays onto the continent of North America, as Juan Ponce de León and his successors probed Florida and the Gulf Coast in search of slaves, wealth, and a passage to the Pacific. In August 1526, for example, six Spanish ships landed on the coast of what is now South Carolina. Their commander, Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, brought at least five hundred people— men, women, and children— along with one hundred horses and enough cattle, sheep, and pigs to start a settlement. They pushed south along the coast to find a suitable location, and they constructed a small village of thatched-roof huts. But within months Ayllón died, and bitter tensions arose over who should succeed him. In the midst of this struggle for control, African slaves set fire to some of the houses at night. Divided and embittered, 150 survivors straggled back to the Caribbean as winter set in. Almost all the rest —more than 350 people— died because of sickness, violence, hunger, or cold. But it was rumored that some of the Africans had escaped their bondage and remained to live among the coastal Indians. That same winter the Spanish king approved another expedition to the Florida region, and five ships, commanded by Pánfilo de Narváez, set sail from Spain in June 1527. The following spring more than four hundred soldiers and servants, including some men of African descent, landed near Tampa Bay and marched northwest. They hoped to make great conquests, but they were poorly prepared and badly led. The Indians fought fiercely to defend their own lands, and soon the invaders were separated from their supply boats and from each other. Most died in the Gulf Coast wilderness, but a few survived long enough to be taken in by local tribes. Miraculously, four such men encountered one another on the Texas coast in 1534. They evaded the tribes with whom they were living and set off across the Southwest in hopes of reaching
To Make Our World Anew : Volume I: A History of African Americans to 1880, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=422450.
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CHAPTER 3 Revolutionary Citizens 1776– 1804 Daniel C. Littlefield In October 1772 a young Boston woman wrote a poem dedicated to William Legge, earl of Dartmouth, who lived in London. A man reputedly of humane character, the earl had recently been appointed by the British king as secretary of state for the colonies. He took charge during this troubled period in relations between Britain and its North American possessions. The young Boston woman hoped that the earl would respond favorably to the difficult issues that prevented harmony between the king and his colonial subjects. She flattered him as a friend of “Fair Freedom ” who would end the “hated faction ,” or dissension, that the crisis created. Ironically, the young woman who wrote so knowledgeably about the colonial struggle for liberty and who was so aware of the political affairs and personalities of the day was not free herself. Her bondage gave her an acute sensitivity to issues of slavery and freedom. As she wrote the earl: Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung , I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatched from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat; Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? . The poet’s name was Phillis Wheatley, and she was brought from the West Coast of Africa, probably from the Senegambia region, to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1761. Her life spanned the era of America’s revolutionary struggle with Great Britain, and her death in 1784 followed by one year Britain’s recognition of America’s independence. She wrote a poem lauding George Washington as well as one praising King George III, and she attracted the attention of revolutionary patriots such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, and the American naval hero John Paul Jones. She was the first African American to publish a book of poetry and she gained international notice. Yet she was also a slave and composed most of her poetry while in that condition. Her color, enslavement, keen intelligence, and, quite likely, her gender all contributed to her fame. She was seen as unique because many people at that time did not think that Africans had intelligence or capability equal to that of Europeans. Many believed that Africans could not be educated, that they had no capacity for original or creative thought, and that they were best suited to servitude.
To Make Our World Anew : Volume I: A History of African Americans to 1880, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=422450.
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CHAPTER 4 Let My People Go 1804– 1860 Deborah Gray White On August 30 in the year 1800, a chilling fear spread among the white people of Henrico County, Virginia. Within a few days the fear had gripped the minds of most white Virginians. Within weeks, slaveholders as far west and south as what was then the Mississippi Territory were cautioning each other to beware of suspicious behavior on the part of blacks. On their tongues was the name Gabriel Prosser; in their minds were thoughts of what might have happened if Prosser had succeeded in leading Virginia slaves in revolt against slavery. Prosser, his wife, Nanny, and his two brothers, Martin and Solomon, were a slaveholder’s nightmare. Born into slavery, they declared themselves fit for freedom. They decided not only that they would be free but that all slaves should be free. Together they plotted to lead the slaves of the Richmond area in revolt against the city. Their plan was to capture the arsenal and, once supplied with weapons, to take over Richmond and then other cities in the state. Virginia, it was planned, would become a free state, a black state, a homeland for those unfit for slavery. But Prosser never got a chance to put his plan into action. On the night of the scheduled attack on Richmond, a terrible storm washed out the bridges and roads to the city. Prosser had to postpone his rebellion, and the delay gave someone time to betray him and expose the plan. All who conspired in the revolt were captured and put to death. Gabriel was among the last to be captured, tried, and hanged. He was, however, one of the first people in the nineteenth century to struggle in the name of freedom. And this is really the theme of this period of AfricanAmerican history: the fight against slavery, the struggle to be free American citizens, and resistance, despite incredible odds, to maintain human dignity in the face of overwhelming inhumanity. The chance that the African Americans would succeed was small. The odds against it being a bloodless struggle were overwhelming. And those odds increased when cotton became this country’s principal export crop, after Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made the production of hearty short-staple cotton profitable.
To Make Our World Anew : Volume I: A History of African Americans to 1880, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=422450.
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CHAPTER 5 Breaking the Chains 1860– 1880 Noralee Frankel In 1898, years after the Civil War, Alfred Thomas, an African-American soldier in the Union army, explained his decision to enlist. He was a slave in Mississippi when he first encountered the Yankees. After the Union soldiers rescued a slave from the plantation where Thomas lived, he and his companions became convinced that they should escape slavery themselves by going with the Union soldiers. As he recalled, “Well we had been hearing the guns at Natchez and all over the country and everybody was scared and kept hearing people say the negroes would be free and we heard of colored people running off to the Yankees….” Alfred Thomas was one of eighteen hundred thousand African Americans who served in the Union army during the Civil War. There were also some twenty-nine thousand African Americans who fought in the Union navy. African Americans participated in fifty-two military engagements, and thirty-seven thousand died. As the United States became increasingly polarized over slavery in the 1850s, the North and South became suspicious of each other’s political power. Slavery was tied to the fight over states’ rights— the doctrine that all rights not reserved to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution are granted to the states. Disputes between the supporters of slavery and the proponents of free labor were responsible for many of the political, economic, cultural, and ideological differences that divided the country during the war. After Fort Sumter surrendered to the Confederacy on April 14, 1861, the southern states proceeded to organize an army under the leadership of Robert E. Lee. A West Point graduate and trained officer, Lee had turned down President Lincoln’s offer to command the Union troops. Failing to obtain Lee, Lincoln named George McClellan general of the Union forces. But Lincoln grew frustrated by McClellan’s cautiousness and failure to pursue the enemy. He replaced McClellan with a succession of generals to head the Union forces but found them all unsatisfactory. Lincoln finally selected General Ulysses S. Grant to head the Union’s forces because he had proved to be an aggressive, tenacious fighter. Grant’s fearlessness ultimately resulted in far greater casualties than would have occurred under McClellan, but under Grant’s leadership the Union army won the war. For the first two years of the war, Lincoln justified the fighting only as necessary to save the United States from becoming two separate countries. Not wanting to antagonize the border states like Kentucky and Missouri, which were slave states that had stayed in the Union, Lincoln refused to deal with the slave issue in any systematic manner. As the war progressed, however, African Americans and white abolitionists pushed Lincoln to change his mind and
To Make Our World Anew : Volume I: A History of African Americans to 1880, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=422450.
Created from apus on 2018-01-24 10:25:08.