Acclaimed historian Gerald Horne troubles America's settler
colonialism's "creation myth"
August 2019 saw
numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be
the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet
in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo
Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become
South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local
Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee.
Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the
Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of
settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here,
Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the
arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth
century, one must first understand the “long sixteenth century”–
from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607.
During this
prolonged century, Horne contends, “whiteness” morphed into
“white supremacy,” and allowed England to co-opt not only
religious minorities but also various nationalities throughout
Europe, thus forging a muscular bloc that was needed to confront
rambunctious Indigenes and Africans. In retelling the bloodthirsty
story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce
resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and
enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These
settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and its revolting
spawn that became the United States of America.