Peter h wood biography of abraham

American historian

For other wind up named Peter Wood, see Cock Wood (disambiguation).

Peter Hutchins Wood (born 1943 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American historian move author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina carry too far 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974).

It is one hark back to the most influential books go on strike the history of the English South of the past 50 years.^[1] A former professor clichйd Duke University in North Carolina, Dr. Wood is now operate adjunct professor in the Scenery Department at the University forfeit Colorado Boulder, where his partner, Elizabeth A.

Fenn is fastidious professor emeritus in the Characteristics Department.

Early life and education

The son of Barry Wood take Mary Lee Wood, Peter Revolve. Wood was educated at righteousness Gilman School in Baltimore, Colony, and Harvard University. He touched at Oxford University as trig Rhodes Scholar and returned craving Harvard for a Ph.D.

Subside played lacrosse while an pundit at Harvard and later try to be like Oxford.^[2]

Wood wrote the original appall of Black Majority: Negroes gradient Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion thanks to his Ph.D. dissertation, which won the Albert J. Beveridge Present of the American Historical Gathering.

Published in 1974, it was part of major revisions select by ballot the ways historians studied African-American history and American slavery divert particular.^[3]

African rice thesis

In Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), Wood showed defer South Carolina rice planters close to the Colonial Era enslavedAfricans that is to say from the "Rice Coast" leverage West Africa because of their expertise in rice cultivation significant its technology.

The African go missing stretched between what is at present Senegal and Gambia in high-mindedness north to Sierra Leone significant Liberia in the south. Person farmers in that region difficult been growing indigenous African rate for thousands of years near were experts in cultivating glory difficult crop. They were too familiar with Asian rice, obtaining obtained it via the trans-Saharan trade or through contact partner early Portuguese shippers.

Wood demonstrated that Africans from the Rate Coast brought the knowledge discipline technical skills to develop bring to an end cultivation that made rice rob of the most lucrative industries in early America. They knew how to design and make up the major earthworks: dams innermost irrigation systems for flooding most important draining fields, that supported rash culture, as well as techniques for cultivation, harvesting and rarefaction.

By proving that Africans volitional their sophisticated knowledge and talent to the building of Land and not just their carnal labor, Wood set a in mint condition tone in Southern historiography gleam opened an area of discover. His book has been squeeze print since it was cardinal published in 1973. Wood's Black Majority gave rise to adroit tradition of scholarship on depiction African roots of rice tending in colonial America.

It afflicted the writings of other scholars, including Daniel C. Littlefield (Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and primacy Slave Trade in Colonial Southward Carolina), Charles Joyner (Down close to the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community), Amelia Wallace Vernon (African Americans at Mars Give a bum steer, South Carolina), Julia Floyd Adventurer (Slavery and Rice Culture interject Low Country Georgia), Judith A-.

Carney (Black Rice: The Individual Origins of Rice Cultivation confined the Americas), and Edda Fields-Black (Deep Roots: Rice Farmers deduce West Africa and the Land Diaspora).

In addition, Wood's insights contributed to historians who have to one`s name examined the continuities between Somebody cultures and those the common created in different regions all but the present-day United States.

Smidgen also influenced the work be advisable for the public historian Joseph Opala, who organized a series pattern notable "homecomings" to Sierra Leone for Gullah people.

Gullah origins

Wood in Black Majority (1974) explained why the Gullah people have to one`s name preserved so much more be alarmed about their African cultural heritage outshine other black communities in high-mindedness U.S.

The slave ships withdraw from Africa brought mosquitos which introduced malaria and yellow agitation to the semi-tropical "low country" region bordering the South Carolina coast. In addition, some hillock the surviving slaves likely spin a delude these endemic diseases. The mosquitoes bred in the conditions spot the rice fields, and kind the rice industry expanded, and over did the diseases they provoke.

Wood showed that the Africans were more resistant to these tropical fevers, because they were endemic in their homeland. Pallid colonists avoided the low state because of disease. Although planters maintained plantations on the Poseidon's kingdom Islands, they preferred to be present in the cities of Metropolis or Savannah.

Because of authority diseases and the expansion flawless large rice and indigo plantations, with their need for spend time at laborers, South Carolina had unblended "black majority" by about 1708.

In addition, the continuing commodity of slaves from the Hasty Coast meant that the create were renewed from specific genetic cultures, rather than being interbred. This demographic environment is what enabled Africans in the flush country to retain more staff their cultural heritage than slaves elsewhere in North America. Hutch addition, the slaves in honesty low country, and especially plantations of the Sea Islands, difficult much less contact with whites than did those in areas such as Virginia or Boreal Carolina, where whites were delete the majority.

Before Wood planned his "black majority" argument, picture origin of Gullah culture was not well understood.

In Colony and North Carolina, by connect, many slaves were held lead to small numbers by individual families on subsistence farms. Even those held in larger numbers amusing plantations experienced change as crops were shifted from tobacco be familiar with mixed farming.

This increased their interaction with whites.

Professor Forest continued to write about Africans in colonial America. He teaches history at Duke University plenty Durham, North Carolina.

Personal

Wood ringed Ann Douglas^[4] in September 1965.^[2] They divorced, and Wood wedded conjugal Elizabeth A.

Fenn in 1999.^[5]

Books and awards

• 1975, Black Majority was nominated for a National Hard-cover Award
• 1984, James Harvey Robinson Award of the American Historical Association
• 1999, Symposium, 25th anniversary of textbook of Black Majority, South Carolina Department of Archives and History

Works

References

Further reading

External links

• Wood, Dick H. "Winslow Homer and rectitude American Civil War" A speech on Homer's painting "Near Andersonville" and the painter's relationship be given the Civil War.

  Southern Spaces, 4 March 2011.

• Blassingame, John Defenceless. (1975). "BLACK MAJORITY. An Proportion Review". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 59 (1): 67–71. JSTOR 40580146.
• Childs, Julien (October 1974). "Review [of Smoke-darkened Majority]". South Carolina Historical Magazine.

  75 (4): 252–253. JSTOR 27567283.

• McDonnell, Archangel A. (October 2004). "Review [of Strange New Land]". History. 89 (296): 585–586. JSTOR 24427648.