CHRISTINA PROENZA-COLES holds a dual doctorate in sociology and history from the New School for Social Research. She has been a lifelong student of American culture and history in Miami, New York, Havana, and Charlottesville as well as an assistant professor of the Atlantic World/African Diaspora at Virginia State University from 2004 to 2011. Her ancestors include Daughters of the American Revolution, Portuguese conversos, Cuban pirates, a Confederate sergeant, and a governor of Alabama.

Recently, a famous U.S. musician tweeted that Atlantic World slavery lasted so long because enslaved people chose it. He should have read American Founders before he pressed send. In lucid and accessible prose, Proenza-Coles easily debunks the mythological thinking that imagines African descended people as voluntary participants in their own enslavement. Instead, she offers a sweeping history of African-descended people in the Americas that not only centers them in the fight for their own freedom, but also positions them as the intellectual progenitors and central actors in freedom struggles throughout the Americas. Pointedly, she notes that the first court-recognized enslaved person in the future United States was also the first person to launch a legal fight against it. With an uncanny ability to tackle her subject in broad yet digestible strokes (her history of slavery begins in Mesopotamia), what Proenza-Coles does best is detail individual accounts of bravery, resistance and resilience (some well known, others not so much) that challenge prevailing notions that black folks sat on the sidelines of American history. This is no "Forrest Gump” version of events where black people just happened to be there. Instead, American Founders makes plain that the possibility of freedom was conceptualized and enacted by black people throughout the Americas, sometimes in conjunction with European and Native actors, but often by themselves.

CHRISTINA PROENZA-COLES holds a dual doctorate in sociology and history from the New School for Social Research. She has been a lifelong student of American culture and history in Miami, New York, Havana, and Charlottesville as well as an assistant professor of the Atlantic World/African Diaspora at Virginia State University from 2004 to 2011. Her ancestors include Daughters of the American Revolution, Portuguese conversos, Cuban pirates, a Confederate sergeant, and a governor of Alabama.

Recently, a famous U.S. musician tweeted that Atlantic World slavery lasted so long because enslaved people chose it. He should have read American Founders before he pressed send. In lucid and accessible prose, Proenza-Coles easily debunks the mythological thinking that imagines African descended people as voluntary participants in their own enslavement. Instead, she offers a sweeping history of African-descended people in the Americas that not only centers them in the fight for their own freedom, but also positions them as the intellectual progenitors and central actors in freedom struggles throughout the Americas. Pointedly, she notes that the first court-recognized enslaved person in the future United States was also the first person to launch a legal fight against it. With an uncanny ability to tackle her subject in broad yet digestible strokes (her history of slavery begins in Mesopotamia), what Proenza-Coles does best is detail individual accounts of bravery, resistance and resilience (some well known, others not so much) that challenge prevailing notions that black folks sat on the sidelines of American history. This is no "Forrest Gump” version of events where black people just happened to be there. Instead, American Founders makes plain that the possibility of freedom was conceptualized and enacted by black people throughout the Americas, sometimes in conjunction with European and Native actors, but often by themselves.

CHRISTINA PROENZA-COLES holds a dual doctorate in sociology and history from the New School for Social Research. She has been a lifelong student of American culture and history in Miami, New York, Havana, and Charlottesville as well as an assistant professor of the Atlantic World/African Diaspora at Virginia State University from 2004 to 2011. Her ancestors include Daughters of the American Revolution, Portuguese conversos, Cuban pirates, a Confederate sergeant, and a governor of Alabama.

Recently, a famous U.S. musician tweeted that Atlantic World slavery lasted so long because enslaved people chose it. He should have read American Founders before he pressed send. In lucid and accessible prose, Proenza-Coles easily debunks the mythological thinking that imagines African descended people as voluntary participants in their own enslavement. Instead, she offers a sweeping history of African-descended people in the Americas that not only centers them in the fight for their own freedom, but also positions them as the intellectual progenitors and central actors in freedom struggles throughout the Americas. Pointedly, she notes that the first court-recognized enslaved person in the future United States was also the first person to launch a legal fight against it. With an uncanny ability to tackle her subject in broad yet digestible strokes (her history of slavery begins in Mesopotamia), what Proenza-Coles does best is detail individual accounts of bravery, resistance and resilience (some well known, others not so much) that challenge prevailing notions that black folks sat on the sidelines of American history. This is no "Forrest Gump” version of events where black people just happened to be there. Instead, American Founders makes plain that the possibility of freedom was conceptualized and enacted by black people throughout the Americas, sometimes in conjunction with European and Native actors, but often by themselves.