Bringing a New Perspective to African-American History
Nearly 400 years after the first people from Africa were brought to the Americas, Linda Heywood and John Thornton, both College of Arts and Sciences professors of African-American studies, decided to take a fresh look at the group of approximately 20 Africans who first arrived on shore.
Heywood and Thornton, a husband-and-wife team with joint appointments in the CAS African American Studies Program and the department of history, coauthored Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660, which examines the history of the central Africans before and after they arrived in the New World. The book, published by Cambridge University Press, was released last month.
“I think everyone thought they knew what happened in 1619,” Thornton says, the year that marks the arrival of the Africans in Jamestown, Va. “We told the story in such a different way.”
The book includes documentation that the central Africans had embraced Christianity before coming to the Americas. The authors also address the “romantic history” surrounding the first group of arrivals, which Thornton says includes stories about a peg-leg pirate and a warrior queen.
Heywood and Thornton point to the book’s appendix, which lists hundreds of African names, many European in origin. “What’s interesting about these names,” Thornton says, “is that they’re not the ones we associate with slave names.”
Heywood says that the appendix “gives some certainty and some place to African-Americans,” noting that the list may help many people identify their ancestors. “We feel that our work goes beyond the academy,” she says, “and to the public as well.”
Rebecca McNamara can be reached at ramc@bu.edu.