Review Of Strange New Land: Africans In Colonial America By Peter H. Wood

Jordan Guice
US History I
Jennifer Egas
18 February 2018
Strange New Land Book Review
Wood, Peter H. Strange new land--Africans in Colonial America, 1526-1776 / Peter H. Wood. Oxford University Press, 1995. P.p. 105. Strange New Land—Africans in Colonial America is a book written by author Peter H. Wood that is designed to depict the horrific monstrosities African Americans faced during the colonial period. Each chapter is designed to illuminate a different portion of a slaves’ life during this time period, and reflect on all of the hardships one was forced to endure. Peter Wood has written an excellent devotion to the testimony of African Americans arrival to colonial America. Strange New Land—Africans in Colonial America will forever

In addition to creating this connection with the audience, Wood also provides factual evidence in order to support his arguments while also illustrating raw, ground breaking images. The preface is detailed and provides a theme of despair, while also illuminating the need for this novel. The text is very well written, and Woods does an amazing job of providing factual evidence while also remaining true to his beliefs. Along with Wood’s history as a professor of World History at Duke University, and his constructing of Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion, which had the honor of being nominated for a Book award, Wood fights the honor the memory of African American Heritage by informing his audience of all of their

The terrible transformation could be described as “numbing and burdening everything in its path, like a disastrous storm” (24). Everything became dependent on one’s racial status, even their legal status, and slavery became not only reliant on ones’ races, but also their heritage meaning it was passed down from parent to child. New colonies began to form that were not in favor of enslavement based solely on race, however the older colonies continued to grow and enforce their laws of slavery based on race. There were many factors that lead to the horrific treatment African Americans came to endure. One was that colonial leaders began to fear poor and unfree colonists of all kinds. Europeans and Africans had been known to work together, and even strike uprisings against tobacco pickers in Virginia, which lead to fear amongst the colonist. A second reason conditions began to worsen was because of the lack of feedback that was given throughout the African American community. If a master mistreated his African workers, there would be no consequence to the future supply of labor, which left Africans unprotected from the harsh will of their masters. Slavery throughout colonial American began to increases decades before the 1700s and enclose on those around