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African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
Top of the pile
80
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
63/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
David Hackett Fischer
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
May 31, 2022
A brilliant synthesis of African and African-American history that shows how slavery differed in different regions of the country, and how the Africans and their descendants influenced the culture, commerce, and laws of the early United States.
What The Reviewers Say
... more than 900 pages long, encompassing an almost unimaginable breadth of research, information and ambition.
This story is just one of hundreds, many eye-popping, in David Hackett Fischer’s new book exploring how African slaves are as much founders of America as are the iconic and familiar figures of her Founding Fathers.
He argues that historians should not focus solely on the tragic moral paradox of racism and slavery without also considering the positive, enduring impacts that enslaved and free Africans have had on the United States’ founding ideals.
Informed by a mountain of quantitative and narrative sources and leavened by Fischer’s travels on both sides of the Atlantic, this is a comprehensive demographic history with a powerful and important corrective thesis..
