num_pages: 368
description: What forces transformed Africans into African-Americans? In what way did their presence shape the attitudes--and fortunes--of white America? How did black people become a nation within a nation? And what are the prospects for that nation in the 1990s?These are among the questions that Lerone Bennett, Jr., addresses in this triumphant companion volume to his epochal Before the Mayflower.Where that book rendered the African-American experience chronologically, The Shaping of Black America tells its story from a developmental perspective. Its first section, "Foundations," encompasses black slaves and white indentured servants, the black founding fathers, and the relationship between African-American and Indians. In the second section, "Directions," Bennett traces the growth of black labor and black capital and the development of a system that unites and separates blacks and whites. The result is a bold and literate work that persuasively demonstrates its author's notion that "blacks lived a different time and a different reality in this country."
language: English
title: The Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African-Americans, 1619-1990s
titlecomplete: The Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African-Americans, 1619-1990s
genres: Nonfiction, American History, Sociology, Race, History, African American
ratings_count: 57
publisher: Penguin Books