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American Revolution
3 articles on American Revolution
American Revolution
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 5237 Includes: Gradual Emancipation in the States | Revolution and Slavery: The Reality | Seizing Their Liberty | BibliographyThe historiographical debate over how radical the American Revolution was is an old one, but the belief that the war with Britain marked a social revolution in black life was first advanced not by an apologist for the founding fathers but by Benjamin Quarles, in his magisterial Negro in the American Revolution. First published in 1961, Quarles's pioneering study has never been out of print; in 1996 a second edition was released to celebrate its thirty-fifth year. Written at a time when many white Americans, not all of them in the southern states, were determined to deny black Americans their basic rights, Quarles was anxious to demonstrate the black contribution to American victory in 1781. The contribution of African Americans, his argument implicitly suggests, established their right to American citizenship, both in ...
Read full articleAmerican Revolution, Memory of
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1104 Includes: BibliographyThe American Revolution, at its core, was a marked contradiction. On the one hand, American Revolutionaries claimed inalienable rights to liberty and freedom. On the other hand, they enforced the slavery of hundreds of thousands of African Americans. That incongruity was not always so clear to contemporaries, who often believed that blacks were inferior to whites, from whom they were thought to differ physically, mentally, and morally. Thomas Jefferson's opposition to slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) was undermined by, among other factors, his perception of black inferiority. Still, many in the eighteenth century did see a contradiction between slavery and the ideology of the American Revolution. Samuel Johnson, the famed British lexicographer, remarked in his 1775political ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 869Conflict between Great Britain and thirteen of Britain's North American colonies (1775–1783) that resulted in independence for the colonies and in the formation of the United States of America. Espousing views of Enlightenment thinkers who argued that every person had an inherent right to life, liberty, and property, thirteen British colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America rebelled against their mother country and fought for their freedom and liberty. By 1770one-fifth of the population in these colonies was of African ancestry, and almost 95 percent of the African descendants were slaves. The black population was militarily vital to both sides and African Americans were involved in every aspect of the American Revolution. The ideology of freedom championed during the revolution became the rallying cry for those who would fight for the abolition of slavery. ...
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