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SoSe 17: The History of African Americans

Maria-Michaela Hampf

Kommentar

This lecture focuses on the history of African Americans after the introduction of slavery in the Colonial Period of North America. Beginning with a short overview of African History at the beginning of the modern period, it then focusses on the shifting legal and economic status of African Americans from the 17th to the 18th century. With industrialization in France and England, slavery obtained a new character: Chattel slavery reduced slaves to objects that could be sold, exploited and tortured because their work fueled the profits from the sale staple goods within an emerging capitalist society. Around 1820, a new generation of slaves worked on large-scale plantations in the Deep South, thus turning cotton into the single most important staple good within the American economy. Opposition to slavery developed during the American Revolution. It emerged as a straightforward Abolition Movement after 1830. In the meantime, the Underground Railroad put up a very effective resistance movement against slavery, liberating thousands of slaves and securing their passage to the North and to Canada. After the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, the slavery question was debated with great intensity. It influenced the emergence of new political parties, among them the Republican Party. When its candidate Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, the South rebelled and attempted to secede from the Union. The African American struggle for equal rights, but also factors of structural discrimination and organizational racism will be addressed from a political, social, economic and cultural perspective. Select historiographical controversies will serve to engage with important theoretical and methodological problems. Schließen