Posted: 02/04/2022 14:11:05 Modified: 04/02/2022 14:09:35 What is the place of blacks in American history? Until very recently, t...
Posted: 02/04/2022 14:11:05
Modified: 04/02/2022 14:09:35
What is the place of blacks in American history? Until very recently, their history and contributions to American history have been minimized as enslaved peoples of a lower order brought here from Africa by force (the experience of the Pacific Islanders is another story ). Most of the time, this story was written and structured by white people.
But the West African infrastructure for Euro-American slavery was established by North African Islamic traders more than 500 years before a slave crossed the Atlantic Ocean to begin the period of slavery in the hemisphere. western. This history extends from Brazil to the Caribbean, then to the Spanish colonies on the North American continent and finally to the British colonies from 1619 in Virginia.
And this year begins the seminal period of The 1619 Project begun in The Sunday Magazine and the regular pages of The Sunday New York Times in August 2019. Then, last November, the book “The 1619 Project” updated and expanded the prose, original poetry and photography. of this new American black history.
“1619” puts black people themselves, not just slavery, at the center of American history. This is a scholarly and hotly contested new origin story of the dynamic role of enslaved black people in the creation of the United States and American capitalism. Increasingly, the work of Caribbean historians and other under-cited historians is entering American history curricula to recast the history of America’s development and progress, including fantasies of a post-America. -racial with the election of President Barack Obama.
There are many axle-breaking potholes on the road ahead of you; there are many assertions of the “past as I wish — or was not” presented as historical fact rather than new theories for further research.
But the infrastructural fact is that the writing and understanding of American history is itself following a new narrative course shaped by multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research.
Paul Craig
Northampton
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