American Founders

Christina Proenza-Coles is a brave, ambitious historian, for she sets out to recast “American” history by writing “a history of all Americans because our heritage is fundamentally entwined, African and European, slave and free, Anglo and Latin” (p. xi). By her reckoning, multiculturalism “is the demographic reality of the founding and development of America” and the principal agent of social, cultural, economic, and political identity and interest across the Americas (ibid.). Proenza-Coles's sweep of history is broad, and her command of the literature on “black” life, slavery and “freedom,” and related subjects is compelling. She finds many founders. Proenza-Coles succeeds especially in describing the foundings of American places. She places people of African descent at the center of exploration, discovery, conquest, and settlement virtually everywhere in the Americas and claims that, even as enslaved people, they were “instrumental to the initiation and course of virtually every major New

Aesthetics · African descent · African-American history · Ancient history · Art · CONQUEST · Ethnic group · Genealogy · Identity (music · Latin Americans · Melting pot · Multiculturalism · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society