| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gary B. Nash. The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. (The Nathan I Huggins Lectures.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. ix, 235. $19.95.
In his recent book, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2005), Gary B. Nash offered an antidote to the historical amnesia that excluded so many ordinary people from the history of the revolution.Hard on its heels comes this book, an extended riff on one element of the earlier opus: the neglected role of African Americans in the nation's founding. Originally presented as three lectures at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the text is around 30,000 words, published in a compact format that sits snugly in the palm of one's hand. The book may be small, but it packs plenty of punch.	1
Nash is not content to inject a few black characters into the patriotic theater of the revolution by shining the spotlight on actors like Peter Salem and Lemuel Haynes. He insists we understand just how extraordinary was the African American response. White revolutionaries might speak of their "leap into the dark," Nash writes, but for African Americans that leap was much bolder, "so outlandish in its presumption that the distant shore of freedom could be reached we can only marvel ... that men and women of dark skin even tried" (p. 7). Spurning the defensiveness of most accounts of the black presence in the revolution, Nash reiterates that African Americans overwhelmingly identified the British forces as the conduit to freedom, and were right to do so, given the failure of the founders to create a nation free of the abomination of slavery.	. . .

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