Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City

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Oxford University Press, USA, 28.10.2004 - 334 Seiten
Race first emerged as an important ingredient of New York City's melting pot when it was known as New Amsterdam and was a fledgling colonial outpost on the North American frontier. Thelma Wills Foote details the arrival of the first immigrants, including African slaves, and traces encounters between the town's inhabitants of African, European, and Native American descent, showing how racial domination became key to the building of the settler colony at the tip of Manhattan Island. During the colonial era, the art of governing the city's diverse and factious population, Foote reveals, involved the subordination of confessional, linguistic, and social antagonisms to binary racial difference. Foote investigates everyday formations of race in slaveowning households, on the colonial city's streets, at its docks, taverns, and marketplaces, and in the adjacent farming districts. Even though the northern colonial port town afforded a space for black resistance, that setting did not, Foote argues, effectively undermine the city's institution of black slavery.
This history of New York City demonstrates that the process of racial formation and the mechanisms of racial domination were central to the northern colonial experience and to the founding of the United States.
 

Inhalt

Awaking to History on Manhattan Island
3
The Project of Colony Building on Manhattan Island
21
Part II Racial Formation and the Art of Colonial Governance
89
Part III Subaltern Insurgency and the Breakdown of Colonial Governance
187
Epilogue What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Aporia of American Democracy and the Permanence of Racism
227
Elias Neaus Short QuestionandAnswer Catechism
239
Notes
241
Bibliography
293
Index
321
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Autoren-Profil (2004)

Thelma Wills Foote is Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

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