African Founders Quotes

“In American history, racism has not been a constant but a variable which came, went and came again.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“In every American generation, small minorities with strong material interests have often succeeded in stopping urgent reforms, against the will of the majority.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“One pro-slavery writer in New York spoke for many slave owners when he said that emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves would be “the total subversion of OUR liberties.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“This was the rage of an oppressed white underclass, themselves trapped by poverty and ignorance in the new republic, and very different from the anti-abolition “broadcloth” mobs that multiplied in the 1830s. Broadcloth was a fabric worn by men of means in that era.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“A universal law has often operated through much of American history. When race slavery, or other systems of racial inequality declined, racism tended to increase, and new forms of racial violence were quick to follow.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“Mumbett also had another family of her own. Her great-grandson was W. E. B. Du Bois. In his writings, he remembered her with pride, as an inspiration for his stellar career in American and world history.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“New England later attracted large numbers of Catholic Irish, Italians, Jews, Armenians, and others. Each of these many ethnic groups cherished its own heritage. At the same time, they also became New Englanders. They lived in Yankee houses, grew accustomed to town meetings, began to talk like Yankees, and learned to play by Yankee rules.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“The moral passages in Coffe Slocum’s journals were not examples of static African “survivals,” or of rote borrowing from Puritan and Quaker beliefs. They were something new in the world—another ethic that emerged when African and European traditions met in the mind of a very bright and able Akan-speaking freedman in eighteenth-century New England.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“With many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early twenty-first century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“New generations of scholars continued to study the same subjects, but in a very different spirit. Their work tended to center less on American liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy. It gave more attention to American slavery, racism, inequality, injustice, and corruption.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, six generations of American scholars were mostly Whig historians of their nation. Their work tended to center on ideas of liberty and freedom, equal rights and republican self-government. Major themes were the triumph of those ideas and institutions over tyranny and slavery.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals