American Founders, Christina ProenzaColes
American Founders, Christina ProenzaColes
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American Founders
How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World

Author: Christina Proenza-Coles

Narrator: Keyonni James

Unabridged: 11 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/12/2023

Categories: Nonfiction, History

Synopsis

American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. While conventional history tends to reduce the roles of African Americans to antebellum slavery and the civil rights movement, in reality African residents preceded the English by a century and arrived in the Americas in numbers that far exceeded European migrants up until 1820. Afro-Americans were omnipresent in the founding and advancement of the Americas, and recurrently outnumbered Europeans at many times and places, from colonial Peru to antebellum Virginia. African-descended people contributed to every facet of American history as explorers, conquistadores, settlers, soldiers, sailors, servants, slaves, rebels, leaders, lawyers, translators, teachers, doctors, nurses, inventors, investors, merchants, mathematicians, scientists, scholars, and presidents. The multitude of events and mixed-race individuals included in the book underscores that black and white Americans share the same history, and in many cases, the same ancestry. American Founders is meant to celebrate this shared heritage and strengthen these bonds.

About Christina Proenza-Coles

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Charles Stephen on March 09, 2022

Proenza-Coles, Christina. American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World. New South Books, Montgomery AL, 2019. This review is not an endorsement of amazon.com or any business owned by Jeff Bezos. Books for my reviews were checked out from a public library, purc......more

Goodreads review by Larry on July 21, 2020

A remarkably important book. Places African Americans at the heart of the New World experience from before Columbus to the post-WWII world. But does so in a non-dogmatic, historically responsible way. Will change the way I teach AA history. One of the five best books I've read this year.......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth on August 11, 2019

4/7, a very high 3 stars. I expected this book to be somewhat different than it was -- I thought it would focus more on black Americans who helped found the U.S. government, but really it was a long listing of people of African descent throughout North and South America and the Caribbean, who either......more

Goodreads review by Monica on March 16, 2024

4.5 At times the writing felt repetitive, but such is the way with nonfiction texts. Overall, this book felt like a necessary piece of history education that I did not get from school. It was fascinating to learn in more detail about the concurrent events in Central and South America and the Carribb......more

Goodreads review by Mannie on January 22, 2022

Phenomenal piece of scholarship that is highly readable to the lay public. This should be read by every American!!! Explodes the doors of ‘traditional conservative white’ American history to provide a nuanced full picture of our multiethnic history, that in mo way denigrates white American contribut......more

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