Donald R. Wright, in African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution, presents a fascinating exploration of an aspect of African Americans in slavery which he effectively argues has not been given adequate attention---the two-thirds of the period of slavery which existed before the creation of the nation. He presents a fresh focus on "the study of American slavery," arguing that the traditional focus "has long been on the institution as it operated in the cotton South between about 1830 and 1860" (1).
Wright's book is memorable and powerful because he methodically tears away at the foundation of the conventional historical approach which has dealt primarily with only thirty years of an insidious institution which lasted for two hundred and fifty years, beginning with the arrival of the first slave in 1619.
It is Wright's unique aim to examine this understudied era of African Americans in slavery, and he succeeds in convincing this reader that the institution of slavery was even more evil and destructive than previously believed, and that its impact on the nation has been far more complex and long-lasting than portrayed in most historians' accounts. Wright is able to deal both with the sociological aspects, as well as the more personal and human areas of slavery, showing how slavery affected the nation racially as it evolved, and showing how slavery in different regions and at different times led to the development of very different means of coping, surviving and rebelling on the part of blacks.
Wright's book covers three basic areas: "the origins and development of slavery and racism in the colonies"; "the beginnings and early manifestations of African American culture"; and "the considerable changes African Americans experienced during the tumultuous quarter century of the Revolutionary era" (2-3). In the process of examining these three fundamental topics, the author presents...