Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699-1860

Not so long ago historians widely doubted that much could be known about the African background of the enslaved population that labored within the territory that became the United States. Among those who thought there was even a past worth recalling, at best one could recover a generalized background, the discovery of “least common denomina-tor[s],” as the anthropologist Melville Hersko-vits expressed it in The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), that preserved enough of a culture to keep African Americans from being people completely without a history. In a few cases, mostly outside the United States, one could be more specific (as in the case of Dahomey and Haitian voodoo), and, in a very few cases in Louisiana and on the sea islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, there were hints of an earlier history. Some allege that vestiges of this argument, with significant reinterpretation, can still be seen in the influential work of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1992). Since the 1970s, however, an argument running counter to that generalized version of African American culture has received increasing support, suggesting that more specific connections can be made. These new discs provide the wherewithal for extending the work in this direction and many others

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