Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:
American Uprising Revisits Louisiana's 1811 Slave Revolt
If the adage “history is written by the winners” is true, then what does that mean for African American history, especially now that more W’s are slowly but surely showing up in our won-loss column? How hard will it be to convince the rest of America to replace the commonly accepted falsehoods and deliberate omissions about the history of black Americans with the fruits of careful scholarship? Daniel Rasmussen, a recent Harvard graduate, has decided to step up to the plate and take a whack at righting the historical record with American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt, a brief but cogent narrative that reinterprets the circumstances surrounding the largest slave revolt in American history.
Much of African American history has been ignored or suppressed for centuries. Most of what I know about African American history has come from reading on my own. There was no mention of the Rosewood massacre, or the Tulsa race riot, or even the Orangeburg massacre, an infamous event that happened right there in my hometown, in any history books I studied in school. The only thing we covered, probably because I was in South Carolina, was the Denmark Vesey led uprising. Even in college, the African American studies classes I took only went so far. Which is why I was excited last week to get my review copy of American Uprising.
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