'Black Yankees' By William D. Piersen: Summary

Superior Essays
The lives of black people in the northern colonies around the eighteenth century are rarely ever mentioned and it’s usually overshadowed by the lives of blacks in the south.The book Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England by William D. Piersen examines “Afro-Americans” in New England establishing a subculture for themselves amongst white New England natives. The author discusses in the book how black New Englanders in eighteenth-century intertwined Euro-Americans cultures and their African cultures to create their own way of life within the constraints of the oppressive and puritanic society.The author, Piersen makes his readers think about what it was like to be an African immigrant …show more content…
The author does not focus, this book around the history of slavery in New England. Instead Piersen concentrates on the processes of assimilation and creation of a subcultural from the black bondsman 's point of view.
The book consist of 5 significant categories the author discuss in great detail for his readers to understand the steps that northern Negroes took to form a larger culture. The first section in the book is on African American immigrants and Black Yankees. In chapters one the author discuss black people or the “New Negroes” experiences while traveling and arriving in the New World. Piersen use vivid depictions to describe the “New Negroes” cultural shock when they arrived to the new world such as New England. For example, Piersen writes:
“Olaudah Equiano,for example, recounted his awe of great sailing ships and navigational aids of the Atlantic Trade and his amazement on coming ashore to horse-drawn wagons, multistoried houses, representational paintings,clocks,and other exotic products of Euro - American

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    During the colonial times it was hard for slaves. Envisioning the pain and frustration they went through as a result of being seen as savages and catastrophic, is not something that gives pleasure. This book also aligns with the content we have received about the formation of the thirteen colonies. The Puritans sailed across the sea, they are what started the revolt against the Church of England. Little did they know that later on, other colonies would join forces in order to officially split away from the…

    • 1442 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Arc of Justice Analysis The amounts of themes that can be taken from this terrific book are abundant. The story makes the reader really feel and understand the struggles that the African American people faced during the 1920’s. The Sweet family is faced with the fear of riots attacking their new house in a white community.…

    • 1094 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ap World History Dbq

    • 286 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The reforming time period from 1775 to 1830 was full of diverse changes. However, the “peculiar institution” and the changes it brought was one of the most noteworthy. These years witnessed both an increase in enslaved African Americans, and shockingly, also an increase in freed African Americans. In this essay, those such people will be our focal point. Paragraph 2 – expansion of slavery Although seemingly hopeless, many changes were taking place during this time period to turn things around.…

    • 286 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Contemporaries increasingly referred to a “New Negro” who, in the words of the radical Messenger magazine, would no longer “turn the other cheek,” for the New Negro would fight to make “America safe for himself.” Indeed, a new impatience with the racial status quo, and a new willingness to challenge it, was evident in the countless actions of black migrants, blacks women’s clubs and suffrage groups, black unions and labor associations, and local chapters of civil rights groups.” (Page V & Vi Black Protest: Preface) The New Negro was established by the first migrants and Isaac was progressing along with this movement when he migrated to the North. The New Negro created a community for black people in the North and gave them pride within their…

    • 1070 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The memoir of Jasper Rastus Nall, “Freeborn Slave: Diary of a Black Man in the South” is unique in that it offers an exclusive viewpoint even among the variety of critically acclaimed historical novels of his time. It includes an assemblage of both first and second-hand accounts by Nall of his and his family’s history. Although the novel shows shortcomings in Nall’s biases and a few stories that depart from the motif, its true strengths are in the book’s organization, its honest account of what it was like to be a black man in the south, and its competency depicting Nall’s confidence in the value of education. The author’s tone in recounting these stories reflect his determined, frank, and serious nature with intelligible language easy for the reader to understand. Nall’s writings are composed matter-of-factly and there is no further embellishment beyond what is necessary for his stories, giving the reader a sense of assurance in his veracity.…

    • 1490 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Only in the past two decades or so has slavery in New England become more of a focal point for historians. The average person who does not study history, thinks it was only an issue in the Southern United States. Slavery was written out of history in New England for a reason according to Joanne Pope Melish. Melish explains the process of emancipation in Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860. Joanne Melish argues that the institution of slavery was central to many New Englanders, once gradual emancipation occurred, a new social order emerged and only offered liberty for whites.…

    • 1026 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Alexander begins as far back as to when indentured servitude was as a sense the beginning of slavery, explaining how the growth of commercial farming of cotton and tobacco started a widespread epidemic for the need of cheap labor and therefore slavery came to be. Furthermore, Michelle begins to develop ideas around how American Indians where seen as savages to whites and seen as a threat in numbers while Africans were a continent away and didn’t interfere with voluntary immigration. Farther into the chapter, Michelle describes the social and political structure of slavery and how it has developed over the course of several decades through the use of the Three-Fifths rule and The Civil War, to the point of Jim Crow and to the state of American today with bias of criminal propensities towards African…

    • 738 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Color And Slavery

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Like women, people of color’s role and placement within traditional English society was clearly defined. In the early part of the seventeenth century, the slave trade thrived in the Atlantic, as plantations were established in the New World and the white European land-owners quickly realized that they needed a labor force to work the land, seeing as a startling amount of the Native Americans in the area began to die of disease. In the Natives’ place came captives from Africa who were immediately put to work. The slave trade quickly became a lucrative business as more plantations formed and the need for labor grew exponentially. At the beginning of the slave trade, there was no connection between the color of a person’s skin and their inherent…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    (173). He argues the dreadful experience suffered by African Americans’ family members and ancestors still troubles them until this day and is even more painful due to the fact blacks are still being treated differently by whites. He then mentions the successful black figures in the society that overcame racism and the negativity shown to…

    • 1085 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The historical background of racism white Americans have towards black Americans and the introduction to racial attitudes and discrimination in America is thoroughly addressed by Winthrop Jordan in The White Man’s Burden. Jordan abundantly documents the substantial evolution of slavery’s form. He begins the analysis by describing when the Englishmen first traveled to West Africa and the numerous encounters they had with the Africans. The Englishmen would regular navigate to Africa, but only to trade goods with the Natives. Jordan writes how the African man was generally recognized as just another sort of man to the Englishmen.…

    • 773 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Locke’s explanation of the “old negro” he explained them as a confused individual that was the center of debate in the country. “His has perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism.” This stood out the most because the “old” Negro was treated as an object rather than a human, with that being said they constantly depended on the white population, which easily exposed them to be taken in control of the white society. Leaving the south for the “old negro” was a beginning of a time that African Americans didn’t have to worry about the public and the white man always having an watchful eye on them in order to keep them from doing anything that would lead them to rise in society. The “new negro” generation was substantially stronger compared to the “old negro”, the new negro were always looking for ways to make their hidden talents known.…

    • 458 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Issue of Journal of Black Studies. 37.4 (2007): 465-571. PDF. The essays in this special issue of the Journal of Black Studies focus on the…

    • 1160 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Myne Owne Ground Analysis

    • 776 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Proving that two races were able to live side by side without much conflict, Myne Owne Ground discusses the relationships between the English and African slaves settled in Virginia during the mid to late 1600s. The authors T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes do so by using relatively unpopular sources, and exposing personal stories and experiences from slaves who had the opportunity to work their way up the social ladder. They counter the idea that blacks have always been seen as inferior, and that they were instantly deemed slaves as they entered the New World. Seeing that owning land was one of the most prominent social status determinants during that time, the authors point out that “not until the end of the seventeenth century was there an inexorable hardening of racial lines,” and with the ownership of land especially, anyone, black or white, could be seen as a prominent figure among peers (Breen & Innes, 5).…

    • 776 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Between 1790 and 1840, in the Atlantic port city of Baltimore, lies a rich history of poverty-stricken people, a history of multicultural men, women, and children, and a history built on the families who functioned the dangerously unskilled necessary labors whose work was ultimately degrading and short term. In Seth Rockman’s Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, the daily hardships of the African-American, European-American, native-born, immigrant, apprenticed, enslaved, indentured, and free workers in the port city of Baltimore, Maryland, are delicately expressed and validify how prevalent slavery is in the American city. The various ethnic labor groups shared the fiery toil that yielded the early republic capitalism as it progressed to completely depriving the people from their economic security. Rockman clearly states the argument that our capitalist political economy currently succeeds, and or thrives, on labor for prosperity “At bottom, all these workers lived and worked within a broader system that treated human labor as a commodity readily deployed in the service of private wealth and national economic development” (Rockman, pg 4).…

    • 1353 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Consequences of Gender on Freedom In antebellum America, a new genre of literature emerges as freed or escaped slaves begin to write about their experiences in bondage. In a time period of institutionalized slavery and general compliance to its role in society, people know and care little about the issues that slaves faced; but with the emergence of this new genre, general education on the lives of slaves begins to make an impact. The rise of the abolitionist movement is fueled by these accounts, and opens up discussion on many new topics about the legitimacy of slavery. One of the most notable writers of this time is Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became educated and wrote his account, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass,…

    • 1330 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays