Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America. By Peter H.Wood. Oxford University Press . 2003. xv + 110pp . $9.95.
Review first appeared in History 89, no. 296 (Oct. 2004), 585-586.
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Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America
Peter H. Wood
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
In 1990, the City of New York sold a parking lot located two blocks north of City Hall in lower Manhattan. As builders and then archaeologists soon discovered, between sixteen and twenty-eight feet under the asphalt lay the remains of some 420 men, women and children. Amid a burst of national publicity and controversy, scholars soon realized that this was the ‘Negros Burial Ground’– clearly labelled on a 1755 map – that lay just outside the defensive wall built by New Yorkers in 1745. Excluded from white churchyards since 1697, perhaps as many as 10,000 African Americans found their final resting place beyond the wall in the eighteenth century, just out of sight of the city's bustling population. For too long, Peter Wood reminds us, the full story of African Americans in early North America has also remained buried and nearly forgotten outside the walls of traditional accounts of the nation's past. Though scholars in many different fields – including Wood himself, the author of the magisterial Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) – have recovered a rich and diverse African American past over the last thirty or forty years particularly, public awareness of the full dimensions of this history still seems dim, and even many textbooks have yet to make the African American experience central to the main story of European contact, conquest and colonization of North America. First published in 1996, this all too brief overview of the first three centuries of African life in the new world aims to bring that rich history to a wider audience, but is particularly aimed at a younger school-age audience.
The book appears to be drawn from a series of lectures. As a result, there is some repetition in a few of the chapters but overall the approach works admirably. Drawing on a wide array of scholarship without getting bogged down in historiographic controversies, Wood does a wonderful job of combining an accessible overview with biographical stories that will entertain readers as they enrich and advance the narrative. Moreover, in a period of increasing interest in the wider Atlantic world, Wood necessarily places the African American experience in a broad context, taking in Spanish ventures in the Caribbean, Florida and the south-west. Though readers wishing to see these histories incorporated into a larger story will have to turn to Wood's recently published co-authored textbook, Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States (2002), this concise yet inspirational primer will be a boon to undergraduates, and a source of evocative and illustrative stories for teachers to enliven lectures. And though designed for a younger student audience, the price, length, helpful black and white reproductions of documents, artefacts and engravings, and accessible prose should help to make Strange New Land attractive to the general reader, too.