Katie B Review of John Blassingame's The Slave Community John W. Blassingame was born in Covington, Georgia, in 1940. Blassingame joined the faculty of Yale University in 1970, where he taught in the African American Studies, History and African departments. He chaired African American Studies for most of the 1980's. He is the author of New Perspectives on Black Studies (1971), Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (1973), and The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972). Blassingame was also …showed first 75 words of 591 total…

…showed last 75 words of 591 total…Whites incorporated African terms into their own language, adopted African music styles (giving birth, decades later, to jazz, the blues and rockabilly) and used African agricultural techniques. Further Africanization of the South occurred when slaves cared for white children. The children invariably picked up African proverbs, terms and attitudes. Slaves retained their culture through language, songs, dances, stories, names, customs and white Africanization, maintaining a sense of psychological freedom in the face of physical enslavement.