Historical Accuracy
John Dewar Gleissner wrote: "Roots depicted over half a dozen separate and inaccurate myths about slavery: Slaves were captured with nets by whites. Kidnapping by whites was the prime source of slaves. ... The truth is that most slaves were captured during wars, those wars being between different African powers." Through a series of conflicts, primarily with the Fulani Jihad States, about half of the Senegambian Mandinka were converted to Islam while as many as a third were sold into slavery to the Americas through capture in conflict.
Read more about this topic: Roots (TV miniseries)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or accuracy:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“As for farming, I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)