Publishers Weekly
★ 03/14/2022
Pulitzer winner Fischer (Washington’s Crossing) delivers a sprawling inquiry into “what happened when Africans and Europeans came to North America, and the growth of race slavery collided with expansive ideas of freedom and liberty and rule of law.” Examining nine “Afro-European regional cultures” that developed in early America, he profiles hundreds of people of African descent, including Massachusetts poet Phillis Wheatley; Yarrow Mamout, a Muslim master bricklayer in Maryland; Louis Congo, the royal executioner of Louisiana; and Texas cowboy Mathew “Bones” Hooks, who reputedly could “stay on any horse alive.” Fischer touches on myriad aspects of his subjects’ lives, including the religions they practiced, the languages they spoke, and the arts, crafts, and music they created. The level of detail astonishes: a discussion of America’s “maritime frontiers” touches on how the Chesapeake log canoe, a type of sailboat, evolved from the West African dugout. Distilling African “gifts” to America in the fields of language and speech, music, spirituality, and ethics, Fischer contends that the “abiding faith in living free” maintained by enslaved Africans and their descendants “has been one of the greatest African contributions to America and the world.” Enriched by Hackett’s deep empathy, scrupulous research, and lucid prose, this milestone study casts American history in a new light. (May)
Booklist (starred review)
"Emphasizing regional variations and the agency of individuals, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Fischer shows how Africans responded to racial slavery in ways that ultimately redefined and expanded American notions of freedom. . . . 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."
David W. Blight
"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."
Gordon Wood
"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."
Joseph J. Ellis
"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."
The New York Times - Drew Gilpin Faust
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.
Library Journal
★ 04/01/2022
With a focus on "open inquiry and empirical truth," Hackett Fischer (emeritus, history, Brandeis Univ.; Fairness and Freedom) investigates questions about slavery in nine American regions, supported by statistics from slavery databases and anecdotes from diaries, letters, and memoirs. He begins by tracing the origins of African slaves and white European settlers in each of the nine regions, and argues that diverse African cultural features (philosophies, ethics, folklore, language, foods, agricultural, technical skills) combined with European and Indigenous cultural practices to form enriched composite North American traditions with an enduring impact. In many of the book's examples, African Americans creatively transformed and enlarged founding ideals and institutions (liberty, justice, marriage, property ownership, education, mutual support systems). Hackett Fischer also posits that each U.S. region's model of slavery was unique; none were just, but some were more brutal than others. He contends too that racism was "not quintessentially American" but rose and fell in waves. Finally, 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. VERDICT This riveting, extensive study will prove invaluable to students of the history of slavery and African American history.—Margaret Kappanadze
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-04-13
A highly valuable new study of African Americans as vital “agents of change in the early history of the United States.”
In his latest sweeping, scholarly history, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Fischer delivers an exhaustive, multidimensional work about the waves of enslaved Africans brought forcibly to America and how their cultural elements interacted with White-controlled society to create a variety of unique American regions. Skillfully delineating background stories and autobiographical details that were often lost or erased—where they came from, what languages they spoke, and the cultural and spiritual beliefs they brought with them—Fischer makes excellent use of primary sources such as slave narratives and records of resistance movements as well as recent advances in online databases. “For the history of African slavery in America,” he writes, “the leading example is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a major project of quantitative research, with free and open digital access to all who wish to use it.” In addition to archival research, Fischer clearly demonstrates “the importance of going there”—i.e., traveling to the places he discusses, including the port of Anomabu, on the Gold Coast, a significant source of enslaved labor during the 18th century. From the first Puritan colonies to the Hudson Valley and New York City to the Delaware Valley, Chesapeake Virginia and Maryland, the coastal Carolinas and Georgia, Louisiana, and throughout the Gulf Coast, Fischer thoroughly examines the regional cultural melding of White communities (British, Dutch, Scots-Irish, etc.) with clusters of diverse enslaved Africans. The author chronicles many examples of notable personages, such as authors, spiritual leaders, and highly skilled artisans. He also deftly tracks insurgencies, which were often followed by punishment and further repression; literacy as a form of resistance; and the origins of “hyphenated ethnicity,” which, “in its many applications…greatly enlarged the idea of America itself” and “was put to work in many other nations of increasing diversity.”
A tour de force of fascinating, multilayered research that adds significantly to the literature on the early republic.
