A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 - Couverture souple

Sensbach, Jon F.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0807823945 ISBN 13 : 9780807823941

Editeur : The University of North Carolina Press, 1998

Synopsis

In colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge--an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community's demand for labor grew, the Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms, shops, and industries. Moravians believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together--though white Moravians never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God.
Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals.
|The power of race to overwhelm other ideals is conveyed in this history of N.C.'s Moravian colonists and their slaves. They worked and worshiped together for decades, until the Moravians installed blacks in a separate church.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Jon F. Sensbach is assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. Previously, he worked as a public historian at Old Salem in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date d'édition: 1998
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0807823945
• ISBN 13: 9780807823941
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible