William D. Piersen. Black Yankees: The development of an Afro-American subculture in eighteenth-century New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 256 pp. $25.00 (cloth); $11.95 (paper)
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1990
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 65 KB
- Volume
- 26
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
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✦ Synopsis
Making use of long-neglected folklore materials from New England town histories, William D. Piersen gives us the voices of common black people speaking for themselves and shows how those coming from African cultures influenced the creation of the larger American culture. In their religious beliefs and practices, their work habits and crafts, their music and dance, cooking, dress, and sexual relations, their sense of family and community, and in the grand celebrations of their holidays, black New Englanders created their own way of life within the constraints of the oppressive and puritanical Yankee world.
While it is generally known that many aspects of African heritage survived the slave experience in the United States, Black Yankees is one of the few studies to show how this process actually occurred. The book is not so much a history of slavery in New England as it is a historical study of the building of American culture as seen from an Afro-American and interdisciplinary perspective.