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Africa and America: Slavery, Antislavery, and Cultural
Exchange in the Making of America - History 949
Professor W. Jeffrey Bolster
University of New Hampshire
Fall, 1997
This course can be seen as part of the growing movement in
early modern history to chart an Atlantic history, in which developments on
both sides of the Atlantic are understood as vital to the making of America.
Our goal is an understanding of the evolutionary development of Afro-America,
with particular attention to the inextricability of race, freedom, African
American culture and capitalism in the creation of America. Our approach will
be to examine the cultural encounters, economic imperatives, and moral predicaments
generated by the African slave trade, and to try to understand these relationally.
In what ways did each affect the others? At the core of such a quest is an
understanding of history as process, and a recognition of the perspectival
nature of knowledge.
The restraints imposed by perspective and the limitations of narrative itself
are such that few histories encompass most elements of what was once concurrent
experience. In an attempt to overcome those limitations I have assigned works
by sociologists and anthropologists as well as intellectual, economic, social
and cultural historians. There is a danger that such a reading list can lead
to a series of dead ends: that it will become more centripetal than centrifugal.
Of course, my hope is that the juxtaposition of these different types of history
will lead to a fuller appreciation of the culturally embedded and historically
constructed relationships between economics, race, ideas, and identities in
early America. Each are intimately connected, although scholars have not always
treated them that way.
I hope that each of us leaves the course with a more profound understanding
of how historical peoples in early America linked experience and meaning,
and of how those peoples' assumptions and actions created a history neither
controlled nor fully intended by any group.
Reguired Texts
The following are available for purchase at the UNH Bookstore and at the Durham
Book Exchange.
Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World
Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century
Virginia
Ronald G. Walters, The Abolitionist Appeal
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
Emilia Viota da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood.
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro- American
Art and Philosophy
Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class
A Course Reader is also required, and is available at the HUB
Copy I Center. Assignments marked ** are in the Reader.
Course Requirements
Each student will write 3 short papers (6-8 pages) and one longer paper (approx.
15 pages).
For the three short papers I will ask you to select three of the weekly topics,
and then to prepare a paper on a comparison or a relationship using that topic
as your starting point. Some examples follow.
If the week's topic is "Slave Resistance," you might prepare a paper
comparing slave resistance in different periods or places. For instance, you
could compare slave resistance in the British Caribbean or Brazil with that
of the southern states. You might also prepare a paper on the relationshio
betweeen slave resistancej and slaves' religion, ethnicity, or degree of acculturation.
You might also prepare a paper comparing the approach to slave resistance
of intellectual and social historians, or of anthropologists and sociologists.
If the week's topic was the formation of African American identities
you might explore the relationship of identity-formation to occupation, local
environment, ethnicity, faith, resistance or accomodation. You might also
write a review essay comparing different scholars' approaches, and then suggesting
avenues for future work.
If the week's topic was "A Functionalist Approach to Slavery,I you might
explore intellectual alternatives, such as the psycho- sexual or the economic-determinist
analyses of slavery's roots. Your options for framing these papers are virtually
unlimited, with the caveat that they are meant to explore a comparison or
a relationship in the study of slavery, antislavery, and cultural exchange
in the making of America. Given the flexibility of the assignment, however,
it is imperative that you clearly present the goals of your papers. Through
the title you choose, and the introductory paragraph you write, make sure
that you get your reader on track.
These short papers are due on the Monday following the class in which your
week's topic was discussed. The fifteen page term paper is meant to be a more
ambitious work that also explores a comparison or relationship. Ideally, I
would like you to examine some relationship of rarely paired approaches to
our subject. I hope we can identify topics that work at the intersections
of intellectual and economic history; social and environmental history; cultural
and intellectual history; intellectual and environmental history.
To do so is to help us transcend ordinary ways of looking at
the past. Please discuss your topic with me for approval by October 15.
This paper is due Friday, December 19.
Grading
First Paper 20%
Second Paper 20%
Third Paper 20%
Term Paper 20%
Participation 20%
I expect that your work will be submitted in a timely fashion. A grade of
Incomplete for coursework like this ultimately does not work to your advantage.
Schedule of Meetings
W Sept 3 Introductions
W Sept 10 FREEDOM AS A CULTURAL VALUE
Assignment: Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western
Culture
W Sept 17 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATLANTIC PLANTATION SLAVERY
Assignment: Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
and **Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, pp. ix-94.
W Sept 24 CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND SLAVERY IN AFRICA
Assignment: John Thornton, Africa and Africans
W Oct 1 A FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH TO AMERICAN SLAVERY
Assignment: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavey, American Freedom
W Oct 8 SLAVE RESISTANCE
Assignment: Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Resistance
W Oct 15 THE AFRICAN DIASPORA AND THE FORMATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITIES
Assignment: Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture, vii- 244; **W. Jeffrey
Bolster, "An Inner Diaspora" in Through a Glass Darkly; Bertram
Wyatt-Brown, "The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old
South," AHB 93 (Dec, 1988).
W Oct 22 CAPITALISM AND HUMANITARIANISM
Assignment: **Thomas Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian
Sensibility," AHB 90
(Apr. and June, 1985).
W Oct 29 THE IMPACT OF SLAVERY ON WHITE ABOLI;IONISTS
Assignment: Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal
W Nov 5 SLAVERY, ANTISLAVERY, AND CULTURAL CHANGE
Assignment: Viota da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood
W Nov 12 TRANSFORMATION OF AFRICAN CULTURES IN THE AMERICAS
Assignment: Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit
W Nov 19 DIASPORIC RECONSTRUCTIONS
Assignment: Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom
W Dec 3 HISTORY AND MEMORY
Assignment:- **David W. Blight, "For Something Beyond the Battlefield:
Frederick Douglass and the
Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War," JAR 75 (March, 1989); David
W. Blight, "W.E.B. DuBois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory,"
in History and Memory in African-American Culture;
Genevieve Fabre, "African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the
Nineteenth Century," ibid.
W Dec 10 LEGACIES -- RACE, CLASS, AND CULTURE
Assignment: Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American
Working Class
History 949 Supplementary Reading List
1. Culture, society and slavery in Africa
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World.
1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992).
The UNESCO General History of Africa, esp. vol V, Africa From the
sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, (1992).
Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., The Ideology of Slavery in Africa, (Sage Publication,
1981).
George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology. Society and Trade in
West Africa. 1000-1630 (Boulder, CO., 1993).
2. The history of slavery in global context
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge,
Harvard Univ Press, 1982).
M. I. Finley, "Between Slavery and Freedom," Comparative Studies
in Soc and Hist April 1964.
The Encyclopedia of Slavery eds. Seymour Drescher and Stanley . Engerman
(NY, Garland Press, 1997).
3. The growth of empires and the Atlantic slave trade
Barbara L. Solow, Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge,
1991).
Daniel Baugh, "Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce," in Lawrence
Stone ed., An Imperial State at War.
Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seame,.
Pirates, and the Anglo-American maritime World. 1700-1750 (Cambridge,
1986), esp. chapter 1.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Oxford, 1944?).
Rawley, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (NY, WW Norton).
Joseph E. Inikori, "The Slave Trade and the Atlantic Economies, 1451-1870,"
in The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries
(Paris, 1979).
4. Development of Atlantic Plantation Slavery
Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Johns Hopkins Press, 1974).
Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic
History(Cambridge, 1990).
Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean. 1492-1969
(Harper and Row, 1970).
T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia's
Eastern Shore. 1640-1676 (Oxford, 1980).
Elsa Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands (Yale, 1965).
Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the origins
of African American society in Mainland North America," WMO, vol.
LII, (1996), 251-288.
5. Anti-slavery thought in a mercantile age
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford Univ Press, 1984).
Thomas Haskell, "Capitalism and Humanitarianism," AHF. 1987.
Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After
1830 (NY, W.W. Norton, 1978).
6. The transformations of African culture in the Americas
Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (NY, Harper &
Brothers, 1941).
Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American
Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976).
Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations
of Black America (NY, Oxford Univ Press, 1986).
Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth
Century Virginia (Princeton, 1987).
Richard Price, Alabi's World (Baltimore, JHU Press, 1990).
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro- American
Art and Philosophy (NY, vintage Books, 1983).
Africanisms in American Culture ed. Joseph Holloway
7. The African Diaspora and the Formation of Afro-America as Process
Joseph E. Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora
(2nd. ed., Howard Univ Press, 1993).
The African Diaspora: Africans and their Descendants in the Wider World
to 1800, written and edited by
The Black Diaspora Committee of Howard University, (Washington, Ginn Press,
1989)
W. Jeffrey Bolster, "An Inner Diaspora: Black Sailors Making Selves,"
in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Self in Early America eds,
Ron Hoffman, Mechal Sobel and Fredrika Teute (Institute of Early American
History and Culture, 1997).
8. Slave Resistance and Rebellions
Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British
West Indies (Ithaca, Cornell Univ Press, 1982).
Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in
the American South and the British Caribbean. 1736- 1831 (Urbana, Univ
of Illinois Press, 1992).
Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in 18th Century
Virginia (NY, Oxford Univ Press, 1992).
Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave
Rebellion of 1823 (NY, Oxford Univ Press, 1994).
9. Slavery in the Age of Revolutions
David Brion Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolutions
Sylvia R. Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary
Age (Princeton, 1991).
Julius S. Scott, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American
Communications in the Era of the Haitian Revolution," (Ph.D. diss, Duke
Univ., 1986).
9. American Slavery, American Freedom: Freedom and Control in American
Culture
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery. American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial
Virginia (NY, WW Norton, 1975).
Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro.
1550-1812 (Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968)
10. Legal Freedom's Possibilities, and Its Cost
Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancination and Its Legacy (Baton Rogue,
LSU Press, 1983).
Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought From Slavery to Freedom (NY, Oxford Univ, Press, 1977).
Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in
Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward eds.
J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (NY, 1982).
11. Scientific and Relious Racism
William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny
George Fredrickson, The BIack Image in the White Mind
12. Race, Class, and Culture
David Roedigger, The Wages of Whiteness
Wahneema Lubiano, ed.,The House That Race Built (Pantheon 1997). .
Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, Bay Press, 1992) .
© 2002 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Created November 2002.