Rövid leírás:
This book has stood the test of time as one of the most readable microhistories of colonial free blacks in America. It restores to the historical record the lives of individuals who strove to better their lives, as well as elucidates a pre-Revolutionary period when social and racial laws in America had not yet hardened. In a new preface, Breen and Innes situate their work in the explosion of work on early American slavery and African-American life over the past two
decades
Több
Hosszú leírás:
Ever since its publication twenty-five years ago, „Myne Owne Ground” has challenged readers to rethink much of what is taken for granted about American race relations.
During the earliest decades of Virginia history, some men and women who arrived in the New World as slaves achieved freedom and formed a stable community on the Eastern shore. Holding their own with white neighbors for much of the 17th century, these free blacks purchased freedom for family members, amassed property, established plantations, and acquired laborers. T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes reconstruct a community in which ownership of property was as significant as skin color in structuring
social relations. Why this model of social interaction in race relations did not survive makes this a critical and urgent work of history.
In a new foreword, Breen and Innes reflect on the origins of this book, setting it into the context of Atlantic and particularly African history.
This fascinating account proves that for a couple of generations in seventeenth-century Virginia the two races lived fairly comfortably side by side….It is an extraordinary and convincing story.
