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.
