David Hackett Fischer's African Founders is a scholarly and magesterial work that tracks how the Atlantic slave trade forcibly brought Africans to the United States--in waves, from different areas and to different areas, at different times. Together, enslaved Africans (from these different regions of West Africa) and free white people (from a variety of cultures in Europe) founded a new nation with a diversity of regional identities.

I made it 48% into this book before calling it quits.

This book while appearing to be about African Founders, is really just about the Africans who were enslaved and ended up making something out of a terrible situation. It doesn't focus on them actually being founders except for two different people who had gained their freedom and made a good life for themselves. But these people still had no actual founding of the country's abilities due to the color of their skin. Did they help out? Yes of course, but the title of this book is misleading in my opinion. Their stories are also told through a white lens once again, taking away some of the power that they would have had.

I had such high hopes for this book when I first saw it, but the more I read, the more I realized that it was just another take on trying to whitewash history.

I do not plan on finishing this book, as I feel like my time will be better spent reading books by black historians telling history as it really is without whitewashing it.

historian David Hackett Fischer explores what he calls nine Afro-European regional cultures in the early U.S., divided into northern regions, southern regions, and frontier regions. Fischer bypasses the popular question of rather the American founding was negative, focusing instead on how African people who arrived via the trans-Atlantic slave trade shaped early American history. emphasizes, therefore, Black people and communities’ effects on their surroundings.

The "invention of racism" was something new in the 1700s, spreading rapidly in Europe and North America to justify stealing people from one land (namely, Africa) and selling them into slavery in the New World, to be treated worse than cattle, to be bred and sold like livestock. In 1776, when the Land of Liberty was launched, a German scholar was dividing humanity into five races. In the 1800s, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's "taxonomy of race" grew into a "full-blown ideology of racism."

Here's the part you may not have heard before: while they condemned (and composed haunting spirituals about) the human trafficking that brought them out of Africa, many African slaves embraced American liberty and opportunity. Some paid for their freedom, learned to read and write, built schools, became Freemasons, bought land, petitioned state legislatures for reform, and contributed a vast set of skills and talents to the budding United States of America. Even if you have a general knowledge of such things, you likely do not know the specifics. Who was Kofi? Why are Coffe Slocum's writings a national treasure, preserved in a Connecticut library to this day? How did "Akan Ethics," deeply rooted in West Africa, inform Protestant beliefs in America? If Boston was the most racially segregated city in America, how did it come about that African slaves in Massachusetts were allowed to intermarry with Europeans and American Indians? Many did just that, and the "melting pot" that was America allowed for a mingling of culture, knowledge, talents, traditions, religion, and the political foundations of a new nation.

I wish more high school history teachers had even a fraction of the knowledge and passion this professor, David Hackett Fischer, brings to his latest book, "African Founders." The concept seems audacious: slaves were able to expand American ideals? How did they manage that?

Because out of Africa came the greatest talent pool to set foot in the New World.

Animal husbandry - not brute force, as Europeans were known for, especially in the Old West - was one of the extraordinary skill sets brought from people who'd learned the finer arts of gentle persusasion when dealing with animals. Don't miss Chapter 7,"Western Frontiers," or the section on "Singing the Herd," or the way Methodist hymns and "Negro spirituals" morphed into many of the cowboy songs we know today. The legendary horse whisperer Robert Lemmons, despite hostility and racism, managed to buy land and tame some white racists as well as a lot of horses. To this day, his descendants own land and businesses in Texas. "Only in America!"as Larry the Cable Guy might say.

Line after quotable line is highlighted in my Kindle. E.g. , "To travel in Africa is to discover again and yet again the enormous scale and unimaginable beauty of this great continent. It is also to observe its vast abundance, teeming diversity, deep dynamics, and inexhaustible creativity."

And this:

"African slaves were not passive victims of their bondage. They responded by actively supporting each other, and by creating systems of mutual support."

They had a system of drumming messages far and wide, said to be faster than the telegraph.

They brought us the banjo.

African gifts of language and speech (they were multi-lingual, quick with rhyme and rhythm, easily able to learn new languages) made them in demand as interpreters when colonists found themselves unable to converse with Native Americans, slaves, and settlers from Spain, Germany, or other neighboring countries of Europe. The slaves were just as quick to create new languages in America.

Some of the most famous horse gentlers of Texas were African American women. Again I say: do not skim or skip Chapter 7.

Chapter 8, Maritime Frontiers, is full of fantastic stories and evidence of the ingenuity of African ship builders. A boat almost 8,000 years old, found in Nigeria in 1987, sheds new light on a lost "aquatic civilization" in the middle of West Africa, going back to the Pleistocene Era.

Many centuries before the navigators of Europe, Africans were building boats, perfecting them, and accumulating knowledge of the rivers and coasts of their vast continent. In what is now Liberia and Sierra Leone, Kru seamen were in great demand. Highly skilled boatbilders carefully preserved time-honored techniques, and their knowledge was imported to America via skilled craftsmen who were captured and enslaved.

Even if you know nothing about sailing, page after page will enthrall you. Europeans, so proud of their own vessels, were humbled and amazed by West African builders, saying "the speed with which these people make these boats travel is beyond belief."

Another awesome aspect of African mariners is their spiritual outlook. The Congo people, e.g., cultivated the idea of the sea as the realm of many spirits, where magical things happen in ways that are in the control of higher powers. Those in touch with water spirits would be able to conciliate them, wearing fetishes and speaking words of thanks to their patron-spirits of the sea. While Euro-Americans might flatter themselves that Western ways of thinking are superior, in many cases, the Africans' animalist beliefs in the sea as a world of spirits set them in a league above the Western mariners. So did their swimming skills. While many Africans and Native Americans were superb swimmers, most white men had never learned to swim, even if they were sailors. Many drowned within swimming distance of shores.

Chapter 8 is brimming with stories and names we should celebrate and remember. If nothing else, this much is worth committing to memory: African boatbuilders, Europeans, and American Indians all learned from each other in the New World.

In a similar way, music and religion were shaped by contributions from Africans in the New World. Jazz, rap, hip hop, spirituals, hymns, and cowboy songs emerged from a mingling of different cultures. I was glad to see that the term "cultural appropriation" is not mentioned in this book. We have all influenced one another, and to get territorial about it would leave me asking why Americans don't accuse anyone of "cultural appropriation" when people of other cultures wear Levi jeans, sneakers, baseball caps, and T-shirts, to name just a few ways that American culture has been adopted by others. But I digress.

One bit of American history is missing from this book: the way President Monroe in the early 1800s sent several ships to Sierra Leone, looking to build a new nation for freed slaves to return to Africa, but Sierra Leone turned them away, and many perished after the long voyage from New England to Africa. Liberia did become a new nation, with its capital city named Monrovia, for Monroe, but not all that many freed or escaped slaves left the U.S. to return to Africa. A hundred years later, Marcus Garvey tried to send ships to Liberia, to build a new nation modeled after the economic freedom and prosperity of the U.S., but the FBI got him imprisoned and exiled, and the nation of free blacks as envisioned by Garvey did not come to pass, except perhaps as the fictional Wakonda in comic books.

Hackett Fischer does mention "New Liberia" in New Haven, CT, but if he explained the Monroe administration's efforts to return African slaves to their homeland, to a land of THEIR OWN, I missed it. Garvey envisoned a new nation with Africans returning to their homeland from America, a free people, governed by themselves, not by descendants of white colonists. History books seem to erase him, and Garvey's grandson was turned down when he petitioned President Obama to issue him a posthumous pardon (for crimes Garvey didn't even commit, but he served time in prison and was exiled from America for the rest of his life). Hacket Fischer's focal point is more on how Africans in America came to embrace the concept of liberty and equality and opportunity, even though barriers of racism and injustice made it much harder for them to succeed than for other Americans. "Inequality" is another issue, and I wrote a long paragraph about that this morning, only to have my entire original review VANISH, and I have just spent my afternoon rewriting the review from memory, minus the excerpts and quotes I took time to type earlier.

Given the horror of writing a long review and having it disappear beyond all salvage after hitting the SEND button, I may make this my last book review for NetGalley. Thank you for the ARC, but what happened today is ludicrious, and hardly anyone reads my reviews anyway, so my career as a book critic may be winding down after I've sung the praises of "African Founders." This is a must-read, a worthwhile, well-written, engaging, and illuminating saga, packed full of historical documents and stories that really happened. If you prefer to get your history in fictional form, you might want to learn about "Fort Negro" via the novel "Down Freedom River" by Joseph Green.

So many, many great stories in this book - I will not rewrite from scratch all my comments on the Black Seminoles, or the Comanches who fought them, or the many groups who would offer the Black Seminoles a chance to buy land and settle nearby, on the condition that they defend their neighbors from enemy invaders, so great was the military prowess of the African Americans who married Native Americans and became the most accomplished of warriors.

Rather than read my long review, just get the book and see for yourself: the skill set, knowledge, aptitude, attributes, intelligence, athletic ability, linguistics and musical talents, and more, all show that African Americans are far from the dark stereotype of an "inferior" race and are, indeed, in so many ways, the "superior" beings. Not that I'm arguing for a reverse form of racism here, but "African Founders" shows us how our Founding Fathers were influenced by other cultures. Hackett Fischer does not mention the contributions of Native Americans to Thomas Jefferson's vision of a free republic (Ian Frazier makes that case quite eloquently in "On the Rez"), but he does a splendid job of showing how African Americans have helped to make America a land of opportunity, even as racism and injsutice set back so many of them.


NOTE:
I spent the entire morning writing a long, detailed review of this excellent book.
I hit "Send," and was asked to sign into NetGalley, so I signed in. AND - my review completely vanished.
I cannot retrieve it.
No, I did not copy/paste it to a safe place before hitting Send.
Lesson learned.

This is an epic, exhaustive, well-researched, well-documented account of the many contributions of African Americans to the founding of this country and the culture of the United States,

I may never again review another book if my morning's work can just be snuffed out in an instant by hitting "Send Feedback."