... 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..

A sprawling inquiry.

Highly valuable.