Meet the Scholars: Dr. John Thornton
Over the next few weeks we will be featuring some of our subject experts and moderators on the blog. This week we’ve asked our participants a few questions about how they have incorporated the themes of gender, race, and contact into their scholarship and teaching. [twocol_one]
[/twocol_one] [twocol_one_last]Name: John K. Thornton Institutional Affiliation: Boston University Title/Position Held: Professor Scholarly Interests: History of West Central Africa, African Diaspora, Atlantic History[/twocol_one_last] How has your exposure to the conference and the themes stemming from our conversation (commemoration, race, gender, class, relationships between native people and Europeans and Africans, etc.) impacted your own research? My research on this topic began when I read Engel Sluiter’s article identifying the Portuguese vessel that brought the first Africans to Virginia. I wrote my own article on the African background of those “20 and odd Negroes” in the William and Mary Quarterly. From this research on African background, I published, along with Linda Heywood, our book on the “Angolan Wave” that carried Africans to the English and Dutch colonies in the Americas in the same period. Independent of these researches, I also was working on Atlantic History, studying how Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans encountered and shaped each other. Since 1995, I have been teaching a course on Atlantic history with a focus on this period and on cultural encounters. Cambridge University Press is publishing (print versions out in September) my book A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1350-1830. If you teach, have you started incorporating the events and themes of 1619 into your classes? How? My Atlantic history course tries to deal with encounters and engagements in all the Atlantic world, Africa, America and Europe, and the back and forth of influences. A lot of this work is comparative, so the 1619 events enter into my classes through studying other encounters, such as those of the Spanish and Portuguese in earlier periods and in various circumstances. How do you think we should commemorate 1619 in our community? I believe that it is vital to focus more attention than is usually given to the African component of American society. It is also important, I think to take some of the focus away from slavery (or from the role of Africans as laborers) and more into the cultural interactions. We can highlight what Africa has given all Americans as a way of shaping our culture over time.