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.
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.
*author of Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for
Citizenship before the Civil War*
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.
*author of Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African
American Culture between the World Wars*
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*
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.
*author of The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class*
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.
*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*
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.
*author of Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in
Colonial Mexico*
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.
*author of Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas:
Restoring the Links*
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*
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*
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*
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