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Peter H. Wood
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Peter H. Wood is an American historian, and author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years.
showed that South Carolina rice planters in the Colonial Era had a decided preference for African slaves brought from the “Rice Coast” of West Africa, the region stretching between what is now Senegal and Gambia in the north and Sierra Leone and Liberia in the south.
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Peter H. Wood is an American historian, and author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years.
African rice thesis
Wood showed that South Carolina rice planters in the Colonial Era had a decided preference for African slaves brought from the “Rice Coast” of West Africa, the region stretching between what is now Senegal and Gambia in the north and Sierra Leone and Liberia in the south. African farmers in that region had been growing African rice for thousands of years and were experts at the cultivation of that difficult crop. Wood showed that enslaved Africans from the Rice Coast brought the knowledge and technical skills that made rice one of the most lucrative industries in early America.
By proving that Africans contributed their traditional knowledge and knowhow to the building of America and not just their physical labor, Wood set a new tone in Southern historiography. His book, which originated as a prize-winning doctoral thesis at Harvard University, has been in print since it was first published in 1974. Wood's Black Majority gave rise to a tradition of scholarship on the African roots of rice cultivation in colonial America, influencing the writings of other scholars including Daniel C. Littlefield (Rice and Slaves), Charles Joyner (Down by the Riverside), Amelia Vernon (African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina), Julia Floyd Smith (Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia), Judith A. Carney (Black Rice), and Edda Fields-Black (Deep Roots). Wood’s insights about the links between the African Rice Coast and the Gullah people in coastal South Carolina and Georgia -- the modern descendants of the rice-growing slaves -- also influenced the work of historian Joseph Opala, who organized a series of historic homecomings for Gullah people to Sierra Leone. He was big on family.
Gullah origins
Wood also explained why the Gullah people have preserved so much more of their African cultural heritage than any other black community in the U.S. The slave ships coming from Africa brought mosquitos which spread malaria and yellow fever in the semi-tropical "low country" region bordering the South Carolina coast. The mosquitos bred in the rice fields, and as the rice industry expanded, so did the diseases they carried. Wood showed that the Africans were more resistant to these tropical fevers than the white colonists which resulted in a "black majority" in South Carolina by about 1708. This demographic environment is what enabled the Africans in the low country to retain more of their cultural heritage than slaves elsewhere in North America. The slaves in the low country had much less contact with whites than those in colder areas such as Virginia or North Carolina where whites were in the majority. Before Wood conceived his "black majority" argument, the origin of Gullah culture was not well understood.
Books and awards
Peter Wood has also authored Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (2002) and Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream (2004). Professor Wood teaches history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Wood received the James Harvey Robinson Prize of the American Historical Association in 1984. The South Carolina Department of Archives and History recognized Wood’s impact on Southern history writing when it organized a symposium in 1999 to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of his Black Majority.
Recent controversy
Although Peter Wood's thesis on the African origins of rice cultivation in colonial South Carolina has been widely accepted by scholars since the 1970s, it recently came under attack by three distinguished historians. In an article in the December, 2007 issue of the American Historical Review, David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson argue on the basis of statistical analyses of slave voyage data that the preferences of South Carolina rice planters had little to do with the fact that many Africans from the Rice Coast were taken to South Carolina in the mid- and late 1700s. They also argue that African knowhow had little to do with the development of the sophisticated techniques used to cultivate rice in early South Carolina. This article does not invalidate Wood's arguments -- and those of Judith Carney and the other scholars who have followed him -- but it will certainly spark a long and lively debate among historians.
Further reading
External links
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