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2 books match the query 'Piersen, William D.'

cover of Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage

Black Legacy

America's Hidden Heritage

William D. Piersen

University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

Drawing on a vast wealth of evidence—folktales, oral histories, religious rituals, and music—this book explores the pervasive if often unacknowledged influence of African traditions on American life. The result is a bold reinterpretation of American history that disrupts conventional assumptions and turns racial stereotypes inside out.

William D. Piersen begins by examining a series of African and African-American oral narratives that interpret the experience of slavery from a distinctly black perspective. Centered on issues of moral truth, these tales bear witness to the meaning and human cost of the slave trade as perceived by those who were its victims. Piersen then analyzes the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted their rich cultural heritage to the new circumstances they were forced to endure. He shows, for example, how they imaginatively—and often aggressively—devised forms of public satire to resist white authority. He traces the transfer of traditional African medical knowledge to the Americas and demonstrates that in antebellum America many black healers were more skilled than their white counterparts. He further shows how African customs helped shape the evolving contours of American culture—particularly in the South—from holiday celebrations, musical traditions, and architectural styles to modes of speech, habits of work, and ways of cooking. The black legacy to America even extended, ironically, to the Ku Klux Klan, whose founders imitated masking traditions handed down from West African secret societies. By reestablishing the forgotten cultural links between Africa and America, this study enriches our understanding of American history and is a powerful testament to the legacy of African culture in American life.

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cover of Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England

Black Yankees

The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England

William D. Piersen

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988

This book examines the development of an Afro-American subculture in eighteenth-century New England. Piersen concerns himself not with the machinery of slave control or the political and social disabilities of bondage, but with the processes of cultural change and creation from the black bondsman's point of view. What was it like to be an African immigrant in colonial New England? What attitudes and assumptions underlay the Afro-American response to Yankee culture? What does the development within the confines of a predominantly white and ethnocentric New England of an Afro-American folk culture in religion, public rituals, folk arts and crafts, social mores, and daily behavior say about the creation of American culture?

On the face of it, the master class called the tunes and slaves danced the beat. Blacks who were taken into New England's bondage were clearly engulfed in a pervasive, narrow-minded Euro-American society that had no interest in fostering Afro-American autonomy. The New England experience was often cruel, and the numbers alone suggest it was among the most unequal of black/white cultural contacts in the New World. Nonetheless, despite the strictures of bondage, the black Yankees of eighteenth-century New England created a sustaining folk culture of their own.
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