Download or read book Black and White Manhattan written by Thelma Wills Foote and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-28 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race first emerged as an important ingredient of New York City's melting pot when it was known as New Amsterdam and was a fledgling colonial outpost on the North American frontier. Thelma Wills Foote details the arrival of the first immigrants, including African slaves, and traces encounters between the town's inhabitants of African, European, and Native American descent, showing how racial domination became key to the building of the settler colony at the tip of Manhattan Island. Foote investigates everyday formations of race in slaveowing households, on the colonial city's streets, at its docks, taverns, and marketplaces, and in the adjacent farming districts. The history of New York City demonstrates that the process of racial formation and the mechanisms of racial domination were central to the northern colonial experience and to the founding of the United States.