Calling late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Virginians of African descent "African Americans" is far more historically accurate than calling them "Africans," regardless of their legal status as slaves or free individuals forbidden to participate fully in citizenship. That is because they were culturally American. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex historical process that is still only partially understood, the cultural Americanism of Virginia's African Americans arose from several factors, including: (1) The fact that as far as is known, no single African ethnicity dominated the Africans who came to Virginia as slaves (some historians, notably Douglas B. Chambers, have tried to argue otherwise, but their arguments have yet to win general assent from other scholars); (2) The fact that the economics of slavery in Virginia, in contrast to (for example) South Carolina or the Caribbean, created a high degree of continual contact between whites and blacks in the region, resulting in cultural interchange from an early date and to a greater degree than in any other American slavery-based society; (3) The fact that slave importation to Virginia peaked around or slightly before the middle of the eighteenth century, so that by the time of the Revolution (for example), most slaves in the colony were not only native-born, but also second- or third-generation Virginians. The result was a creolized African and, soon, African-and-European culture that was not only distinctively American--in the literal sense of arising from circumstances unique to North America--but proved enormously influential (through westward migration of slaveholders and the interstate slave trade) on subsequent American history and culture. If you'll forgive a mention of my own work, you can learn more about the processes outlined above and about the pivotal importance of Virginia's African American culture on one major dimension of American culture generally in an essay I just published, "'Our National Poetry': The Afro-Chesapeake Inventions of American Dance," in Julie Malnig, ed., Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). --Jurretta Heckscher ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html