History 397BE - ST-Colonial Black New England

African Americans developed and maintained significant economic and cultural advancements in colonial America, a fact eclipsed by the experience of slavery. But many African Americans, especially New Englanders, were more than chattel. By the second half of the seventeenth century, a growing number of black New Englanders engaged in an intricate system of Atlantic commerce, selling fish, furs, and timber not only in England but throughout Catholic Europe; shipbuilding; and transporting tobacco, rice, wine, sugar, and other cargo, including slaves.
Although blacks played a significant role in the western hemisphere's foray into global economics, this historical fact is often omitted. This seminar offers a corrective to a major problem in American colonial history by placing African American lives at the interpretive center of our inquiry into early New England history. Our study is framed by the social and political movements to which black New Englanders? participation laid claim; and the ways in which this participation enabled them to assert power in colonial public life. Tracing their experiences as maritime tradesmen, mariners, merchants, yeoman, commercially-oriented farmers, religious leaders, artisans, domestic help, midwives, and bondspeople, we will analyze the intersection of race and gender in early American history. The age of exploration and the establishment of the British colonies in North America in the period between King Philip's War (1675-6) and the American Revolution (1775-83) provide the historical back drop to our intensive treatment of Colonial Black New England. Drawing on an array of primary sources including letters, speeches, photographs, as well as early black print culture, music, and secondary sources, this course is designed to provide experience in the production of a scholarly paper cultivated from archival research that includes primary and secondary sources, this course exposes students to the historian's tools and techniques.