Both standouts for their time – fifty years ago, to be exact – we’re celebrating the continued impact of bestselling books by Peter H. Wood and Theodore Rosengarten that showcased the endurance of enslaved people in early America, transforming the a widespread understanding of early American history. Black Majority (Peter Wood), features a new epilogue in its recently revised fiftieth-anniversary edition that challenges a fresh generation with provocative history. All God’s Dangers (Theodore Rosengarten) may be a “forgotten autobiography” as re-highlighted by The New York Times already once before, but it was the National Book Award Winner in 1975, surpassing many others that came out in the same banner year for non-fiction.
More relevant and enlightening than ever, these literary works tell the stories of colonial African American language, culture, and expertise – all of which form the critical fibers of our nation’s history. Theodore Rosengarten and Peter H. Wood will reflect on what they have learned since publishing their respective works, discuss the future of the African American past, and reveal how their work has shaped their careers as historians and authors.
If you are unable to attend the event, but would like to purchase one or more signed copies, please visit Buxton Books for copies of Black Majority and All God’s Dangers.
About Peter H. Wood
Peter H. Wood grew up in St. Louis and Baltimore, earning degrees at Harvard and Oxford before teaching early American history at Duke University for nearly four decades. In 1974, Alfred A. Knopf published his dissertation about enslavement in colonial South Carolina. W.W. Norton has recently published an updated 50th-anniversary edition of this pioneering book with the fresh title, Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740. Wood is the author of Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America and several books about the Black images of American artist Winslow Homer, including Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is also the co-author of a widely-used college U.S. History text entitled Created Equal. He has served on the boards of Harvard University, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, and the Highlander Education Center in East Tennessee. Dr. Wood now lives in Colorado with his wife, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian, Elizabeth Fenn. Recently, he co-authored an essay on slave-built canals in South Carolina before the Stono Rebellion. When not growing gourds, he is writing a book entitled The Great Southern Blackout, about the scope and consequences of two centuries of forced Black illiteracy across the South.
About Black Majority
First published in 1974, Black Majority chronicles the crucial formative years of North America’s wealthiest and most tormented British colony. It explores how West African familiarity with rice determined the Lowcountry economy and how a skilled but enslaved labor force formed its own distinctive language and culture. While African American history often focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Black Majority underscores the significant role early African arrivals played in shaping the direction of American history.
About Theodore Rosengarten
Theodore Rosengarten is a writer, teacher and a social activist from McClellanville, South Carolina. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ted got his AB from Amherst College, and a PhD in The History of American Civilization, from Harvard. Even as a child, he was obsessed by the black struggle for justice and freedom and by the destruction of the Jews in Europe. His first book, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, the oral history of an African American tenant farmer from Alabama, won the National Book Award. His second book, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, chronicles the life of an unsuccessful plantation owner from St. Helena Island, South Carolina. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography. Last year, Yad Vashem Studies published Ted’s critical review of Steven T. Katz’s opus comparing the The Holocaust and New World Slavery. Ted taught for decades in the Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston and in the Honors College at the University of South Carolina. Since 2002, Ted and his wife Dale have led a biennial study abroad to Poland, Germany and The Netherlands called Tracing the Holocaust. Looking to unearth the past, they encounter the new racial demography of European cities.
About the All God’s Dangers
Nate Shaw’s father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor’s crop. His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw’s oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an “over-average” man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people—and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about.
