African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, the latest work by award-winning author David Hackett Fischer, examines the interactions and intertwinings of Africans and their culture as it integrated into the European base culture that the American colonists brought from there. This majestic work illustrates how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States.
Our conversation with David Fischer, Warren Professor of History emeritus at Brandeis University, ranges from race and slavery in early America to the teaching and writing of history and the future of the American republic.