Black and White Manhattan

The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City

Thelma Wills Foote

Black and White Manhattan

The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City

Thelma Wills Foote

Description

Race first emerged as an important ingredient of New York City's melting pot when it was known as New Amsterdam and was a fledgling colonial outpost on the North American frontier. Thelma Wills Foote details the arrival of the first immigrants, including African slaves, and traces encounters between the town's inhabitants of African, European, and Native American descent, showing how racial domination became key to the building of the settler colony at the tip of Manhattan Island. During the colonial era, the art of governing the city's diverse and factious population, Foote reveals, involved the subordination of confessional, linguistic, and social antagonisms to binary racial difference. Foote investigates everyday formations of race in slaveowning households, on the colonial city's streets, at its docks, taverns, and marketplaces, and in the adjacent farming districts. Even though the northern colonial port town afforded a space for black resistance, that setting did not, Foote argues, effectively undermine the city's institution of black slavery.
This history of New York City demonstrates that the process of racial formation and the mechanisms of racial domination were central to the northern colonial experience and to the founding of the United States.

Black and White Manhattan

The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City

Thelma Wills Foote

Author Information

Thelma Wills Foote is Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Black and White Manhattan

The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City

Thelma Wills Foote

Reviews and Awards

"In this sober, thoughtful, profoundly researched book, Thelma Foote shows that Black people were fundamental to early New York. Under Dutch founders, English conquerors, and American Revolutionaries, slavery, racial thinking, and slaves' resistance were part of the main New York story. Much of that story is ugly, but it is an American tale that needs telling and Foote has told it very well."--Edward Countryman, Southern Methodist University

"Challenging the 'apartheid narrative' of New York City's early history, Thelma Foote illuminates such topics as the legal position of blacks in Dutch Manhattan; 18th-century patterns of slave labor and social exchange; African American burial rituals; and the so-called Negro Plot of 1741."--Patricia U. Bonomi, author of Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America

"For urban historians, especially those who specialize in the history of New York City, this is required reading....Foote's analysis of racial formation will force historians and urban scholars to rethink their understanding of NYC's history."--CHOICE