This course will introduce students to the African background and international context of the African-American experience from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. It will also examine in detail the era in United States history when most African-Americans were enslaved and struggling to become free. It will conclude with a discussion of the Black debate over emigration in the 1850s,and the role of Blacks in the American Civil War and in the Reconstruction that followed.
The first segment of the course will survey:
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(1) the geographic and cultural foundations of West Africans societies prior to their encounter with Europeans, |
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(2) the lines of trade and imperial rivalries between African peoples, |
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(3)the effects first of Islam and then of Portuguese Catholic contacts with West Africa and the different slave trades in which Africans were caught. |
The second segment will compare the establishment of several American colonies, including Jamaica, Virginia, South Carolina and Haiti, to set very different African experiences into the broader context of British and French colonialism and commercial capitalism. 'Me lectures will illustrate the different prospects for persons of African descent in colonies where geography, population mixes, predominant crops, as well as the political structures were very different. This part of the course will also compare the American and Haitian revolutions. We will be particularly interested in the role of the maroons on Jamaica and both maroons and black armies in Haiti, as well as the British Army and run-away slaves in the American South.
The third segment of the course will examine the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom and an African American culture in the Southern United States, as well as the growth of free Black communities and institutions in northern cities between 1800 and the 1850s. For the South we will focus on both the economic conditions that shaped plantation work and the significance of Black apocalyptic religion especially expressed by Nat Turner for shaping African American identity. Our primary sources will be the narratives of fugitive slaves. For the northern states we will examine the ambiguous relationship between Black emigrationists, Black abolitionists, and the anti-slavery movement. Here we will focus on pamphlets produced by black writers like David Walker's Appeal, and Martin Delany's Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party.
The course will conclude with a discussion of Black participation in the Civil War and the fate of the freedmen during Reconstruction.
