American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World

by Christina Proenza-Coles

Overview

2019 Foreword INDIES Finalist
American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. While conventional history tends to reduce the roles of African Americans to antebellum slavery and the civil rights movement, in reality African residents preceded the English by a century and arrived in the Americas in numbers that far exceeded European migrants up until 1820. Afro-Americans were omnipresent in the founding and advancement of the Americas, and recurrently outnumbered Europeans at many times and places, from colonial Peru to antebellum Virginia. African-descended people contributed to every facet of American history as explorers, conquistadores, settlers, soldiers, sailors, servants, slaves, rebels, leaders, lawyers, litigants, laborers, artisans, artists, activists, translators, teachers, doctors, nurses, inventors, investors, merchants, mathematicians, scientists, scholars, engineers, entrepreneurs, generals, cowboys, pirates, professors, politicians, priests, poets, and presidents. The multitude of events and mixed-race individuals included in the book underscores that black and white Americans share the same history, and in many cases, the same ancestry. American Founders is meant to celebrate this shared heritage and strengthen these bonds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781588383310
Publisher:	NewSouth Books
Publication date:	03/15/2019
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	543,518
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Christina Proenza-Coles holds a dual doctorate in sociology and history from the New School for Social Research. She has been a lifelong student of American culture and history in Miami, New York, Havana, and Charlottesville as well as an assistant professor of the Atlantic World/African Diaspora at Virginia State University from 2004 to 2011. Her ancestors include Daughters of the American Revolution, Portuguese conversos, Cuban pirates, a Confederate sergeant, and a governor of Alabama.

Read an Excerpt

Christina Proenza-Coles has written a remarkable book. It combines one of the oldest traditions in histories of people of African descent with the newest advances in scholarship. The combination is powerful.
American Founders, in the older tradition, establishes people in places where they have been excluded from our understanding. We are introduced to African conquistadores and gentlemen painted in striking portraits in Ecuador in 1599, to black landowners and settlers in Manhattan and Virginia, to African American scientists, writers, and political leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The portrayals exert a powerful cumulative effect, giving faces and names and histories to people too often reduced to generalizations and abstractions, to passive roles in other people’s histories. In this way, Proenza-Coles sustains a proud and useful legacy.
Even as it draws on that older tradition, American Founders mines the last several decades of scholarship, in which the geographic and chronological range of history has expanded exponentially. By building on histories of the ancient world and the modern Atlantic world, Proenza-Coles shows that Africa and Africans helped shape global history at every turn. The continent and its peoples appear in the great dramas of world history, from war and conquest to music and literature.
The two perspectives in American Founders intersect with particular power in the history of United States. Proenza-Coles’s hemispheric vision reveals surprises for North American history, as when she points out that maroons established the first settlement on the continent in Georgia eighty years before Jamestown and that in Virginia the first legal case contesting the legal boundaries of permanent servitude was waged between an owner and an enslaved man, both of African ancestry.
Proenza-Coles focuses ever more intently on the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the cumulative force of her story lays a historical understanding for the black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. That moral revolution of the United States becomes comprehensible in a new way after reading American Founders, for we understand just how deep the roots extend into the history of the nation, the continent, the hemisphere, and the world.
Thanks to this book, we can see the largest patterns of history embodied in the lives of individuals with accomplishments born of their particular time in history. We see that American genealogies weave together, that the conventional divisions of history into racial and regional categories artificially separate our story. That perspective, at once broad and humane, is a rare gift.

Table of Contents

Author's Note to the 2022 Edition v

Foreword ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

1 The Rise of Atlantic Slavery in a World Historical Context 3

2 Sixteenth-Century Afro-American Conquistadores 25

3 Seventeenth-Century Afro-American Colonials 53

4 Eighteenth-Century Afro-American Revolutionaries 87

5 Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Patriots and Liberators 147

6 Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Nationals 187

7 Twentieth-Century Afro-American Freedom Fighters 245

Conclusion: New World History 293

Appendix: Eighteenth-Century Uprisings for Freedom 298

Bibliography 301

Sources of Illustrations 330

Index 334

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/31/2019

In this persuasive work, historian Proenza-Coles challenges what she calls “the simplest version of popular history,” which “gives the impression that... black people stepped onto the stage of American history as plantation slaves in the 19th century and entered the political arena in the 1950s.” She shows that men and women of color “were central to the founding of the Americas, the establishment of New World nations, the dismantling of slavery, and the rise of freedom in the Americas.” She subdivides black inhabitants of the Americas into 16th-century “conquistadores,” 17th-century “colonials,” 18th-century “revolutionaries,” 19th-century “patriots and liberators,” and 20th-century “freedom fighters.” She emphasizes African-Americans’ role in shaping both their own lives and American life as a whole, and adds to the general understanding of such events as the founding of the English colony at Jamestown and the American Revolution. She presents succinct but engaging accounts of previously obscure individuals like Elizabeth Jennings Graham, who sued successfully for the desegregation of Manhattan’s streetcars in 1855, and banker and philanthropist Robert Reed Church, the first African-American millionaire in the American South. Lucid prose and straightforward structure make this easy to read, and the unearthing of so many lesser-known figures offers new perspectives to those with deeper knowledge of American history. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-01-06

A wide-ranging synthesis of the history of African influence on the Americas.

In this kaleidoscopic narrative, Proenza-Coles (co-editor: Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 19, 2008), who has a dual doctorate in sociology and history, tackles the long history of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. "In an effort to convey how events and individuals connect to larger historical forces—colonialism, revolution, republicanism, and nation building—the chapters proceed chronologically and endeavor to provide a pan-American vantage point." In that, she succeeds, and her argument is clear and cogent: Far from being mere victims or objects of historical change, Americans of African origin have been central to the country's history and served as active agents in pushing for their freedom and the freedom of others. She is especially solid in her discussion of the era of slavery and its impact on not only the region, but the larger world, and she uses separate sections to provide the capsule biographies of a wide sample of important individuals who shaped American life. Drawn from a sizable range of secondary sources, the book is something of a mixture—not quite scholarly tome, not quite popular history, not quite reference work—but Proenza-Coles writes clearly, her mining of her sources is impressive, and her argument is lucid. She is much stronger on the centuries prior to the Civil War than on the 20th century and beyond. While the timelines that cap each chapter are helpful in keeping track of the many events and milestones she discusses, the endnotes at the end of the chapters would work better as either footnotes or endnotes at the back of the book. Nonetheless, this is a useful history to supplement existing works on the African experience in the Americas. Acclaimed Civil War historian Edward L. Ayers provides the foreword.

Passionate history with a clear point of view.

Kirkus Reviews

In this kaleidoscopic narrative, American Founders tackles the long history of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. The book shows how Americans of African origin have been central to our country's history and served as active agents in pushing for their freedom and the freedom of others. Proenza-Coles writes well, her mining of her sources is impressive, her argument cogent. A passionate work of history with a clear point of view. — Kirkus Reviews

Expertly researched, yet thoroughly accessible to readers of all backgrounds, American Founders is a welcome and highly recommended contribution to both public and college library American history collections. — Midwest Book Review

Christina Proenza-Coles is a brave, ambitious historian ... American Founders lays an essential foundation. — The Journal of American History

Recently a famous U.S. musician tweeted that Atlantic World slavery lasted so long because enslaved people chose it. He should have read American Founders before he pressed send. In lucid and accessible prose, Proenza-Coles easily debunks the mythological thinking that imagines African-descended people as voluntary participants in their own enslavement. Instead, she offers a sweeping history of African-descended people in the Americas that not only centers them in the fight for their own freedom, but also positions them as the intellectual progenitors and central actors in freedom struggles throughout the Americas. Pointedly, she notes that the first court-recognized enslaved person in the future United States was also the first person to launch a legal fight against it. With an uncanny ability to tackle her subject in broad yet digestible strokes (her history of slavery begins in Mesopotamia), what Proenza-Coles does best is detail individual accounts of bravery, resistance, and resilience (some well known, others not so much) that challenge prevailing notions that black folks sat on the sidelines of American history. This is no Forrest Gump version of events where black people just happened to be there. Instead, American Founders makes plain that the possibility of freedom was conceptualized and enacted by black people throughout the Americas, sometimes in conjunction with European and Native actors, but often by themselves. — Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Smith College, Associate Professor of History, author of Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War

To say that any work reminds us of the grand contributions to rethinking the past and the present of the late Vincent Harding risks seeming like hyperbole. But American Founders does just that, with an added hemispheric and global dimension and array of student-friendly features making it ideal for classroom use. Proenza-Coles gives us a stirring and sweeping history that shows how appreciation of the freedom struggles of African-descended people changes the whole story of national histories. — David Roediger, University of Kansas, Foundation Professor of American Studies, author of The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

American Founders is a much needed, well researched, original contribution to studies of Africans in the Americas. The book's breadth of time and place reveals the largely unknown, indomitable, and courageous struggles for freedom of African-descended peoples and their enormous contributions to the arts and sciences and the wealth of the Americas. Most important, this book convincingly argues that we are all one, both biologically and culturally. — Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Rutgers University, Professor Emeritus of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, author of Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

Erudite and balanced, Christina Proenza-Coles traces a complicated and arresting history with scholarly skill and finesse. She compellingly makes the case that the story of greater America is a deeply interconnected history where people of African descent played a more comprehensive, indelible, and sweeping role than once thought. Emerging from her story is a hopeful vision of a common past that links us more than it divides. The dignity she traces builds the framework for a new understanding of freedom and expands the pantheon of freedom’s founders and its defenders in the articulation of the idea of America. Her book is a feat of synthesis and hemispheric understanding, one that refreshingly unites broad reaches of space and time. — Ben Vinson III, George Washington University, Dean of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, author of Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico

American Founders offers an extraordinary, compelling new narrative of the African role in creating the Americas of the Western Hemisphere. From hundreds of sources Christina Proenza-Coles has gathered the stories of people of African descent — politicians, soldiers, poets, journalists, doctors, teachers, and entrepreneurs — who laid the foundations of the New World. Briskly and vividly told, this important work illuminates both the past and the present. — Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, and The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography

This narrative history illuminates the myriad ways by which individuals of African descent fought for their freedom in the Americas—through maroon communities and military service, journalism and political organization, court petitions and club movements. It can stand as a model of a new kind of hemispheric history, as defined by the slave trade and European contact, a counternarrative to help guide historical change. — Joel Dinerstein, Tulane University, Clark Chair of American Civilization, author of Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars

In our politically divided nation, this book shines welcomed light on our common heritage and how many people from diverse backgrounds truly made America great! — The Fayetteville Observer

In this persuasive work, historian Proenza-Coles challenges what she calls “the simplest version of [American] popular history.” She shows that men and women of color “were central to the founding of the Americas, the establishment of New World nations, the dismantling of slavery, and the rise of freedom in the Americas.” She emphasizes African Americans’ role in shaping both their own lives and American life as a whole and presents succinct but engaging accounts of previously obscure individuals like Elizabeth Jennings Graham, who sued successfully for the desegregation of Manhattan’s streetcars in 1855. Lucid prose and straightforward structure make this easy to read, and the unearthing of so many lesser-known figures offers new perspectives to those with deeper knowledge of American history. — Publishers Weekly Starred Review

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