Week 1 Day 7 Eth 125

Week 1 Day 7 Eth 125

The first African Americans: http://www.answers.com/topic/african-american#Gale_Encyclopedia_of_US_History_d Matthew Whitaker
The First Americans
The arrival of Africans in America began almost five hundred years ago in 1528, with the arrival of the Moroccan Esteban de Dorantes in Texas. However, the first English-speaking Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The number of indentured white servants who made the journey to America began to dwindle, and those already in America started to demand an equal share of the wealth, while life expectancies rose sufficiently to make the purchase of slaves financially sensible. Colonists turned to African slave trade to meet their labor needs.
As the eighteenth century came to a close, Africans were considered capital. Black people resisted enslavement, however, and often worked to undermine the institution. They ran away or feigned ignorance and illness to undermine the commercial success of the farms for which they labored. Slaves such as Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser physically confronted their masters and overseers in both individual clashes and collective rebellion. Between the mid 1600s and 1865, most blacks were considered possessions. They were examined, marketed, sold, purchased, exchanged, and treated as chattel. They were ridiculed as aberrant and inferior, and most were denied freedoms set forth in the Declaration of Independence. They were no longer Ashanti, Bantu, Kongolese, and Yoruba; they constructed new identities rooted in their African past, yet inextricably linked to a burgeoning American culture. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made cotton cultivation a lucrative business. Between 1811 and 1821 it fueled the expansion of slavery from the Atlantic coastal states to Texas. Slave labor also emptied swamps and cleared land for settlement and agriculture. Despite the odds, some blacks continued to gain their freedom from bondage; most of those who succeeded had to struggle to survive...