“You Have no Ancestry Behind You”: Black History’s Evolution

"YOUHAVE NO ANCESTRY BEHIND YOU":BLACK HISTORY'S EVOLUTION Benjamin Quarles. Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. ix+ 213pp. Daniel C. Littlefield William D. Piersen. Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. xii + 237 pp. When runaway slave H. Ford Douglass addressed a Fourth of July gathering in 1860, Benjamin Quarles tells us, he considered the pain and problem of the black man's past: "All other races are permitted to travel over the wide field of history and pluck the flowers that blossom there, to glean up heroes, philosophers, sages and poets, and put them in a galaxyof brillant genius and claim all credit to themselves; but if a black man attempts to do so, he is met at the threshold with the objection,