European immigrants also played an important role in settling the plains; by 1910, foreign-born immigrants and their children constituted nearly half the population of the six northern plains states (Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas), with the British, Germans (many of them from Russia …

African Americans who moved to the Great Plains were called Exodusters.

Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many Black Americans headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War.

After slavery, state governments across the South instituted laws known as Black Codes. These laws granted certain legal rights to blacks, including the right to marry, own property, and sue in court, but the Codes also made it illegal for blacks to serve on juries, testify against whites, or serve in state militias.

Approximately 100,000 American slaves escaped to freedom. This is approximately 2.5% of the 3,953,752 slaves in the 1860 Census, about 2% if one includes the slaves who died before 1860.

The Underground Railroad was a secret system developed to aid fugitive slaves on their escape to freedom. Involvement with the Underground Railroad was not only dangerous, but it was also illegal. So, to help protect themselves and their mission secret codes were created.

Slavery itself was abolished everywhere in the British Empire in 1834. Some Canadian jurisdictions had already taken measures to restrict or end slavery by that time. In 1793 Upper Canada (now Ontario) passed the Anti‐slavery Act.

In the English colonies Africans spoke an English-based Atlantic Creole, generally called plantation creole. Low Country Africans spoke an English-based creole that came to be called Gullah.

The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa, who had been sold by other West Africans, or by half-European “merchant princes” to Western European slave traders (with a small number being captured directly by the slave traders in …

Although the Negro spirituals are the best known form of slave music, in fact secular music was as common as sacred music. There were field hollers, sung by individuals, work songs, sung by groups of laborers, and satirical songs.

During the Passage, slaves were encouraged to beat the drum. The hope was that beating the drum would keep their morale as high as possible. But upon arrival in the Americas, beating the drum was forbidden for most slaves.

These genres include negro spiritual, gospel, rumba, blues, bomba, rock and roll, rock, jazz, salsa, R&B, samba, calypso, soul, cumbia, funk, ska, reggae, dub reggae, house, Detroit techno, hip hop, pop, gqom, afrobeat, and others.

The Slave Experience: Education, Arts, & Culture | PBS. Today, slave music is usually grouped in three major categories: Religious, Work, and “Recreational” songs. Each type adapted elements of African and European musical traditions and shaped the development of a wide range of music, including gospel, jazz, and blues …

As Africanized Christianity took hold of the slave population during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spirituals, a type of religious song typically sung in a call and response form with a leader improvising a line of text and a chorus of singers providing a solid refrain in unison, served as a way to …

Sub-Saharan African

slit drum

14 African musical styles for you to explore

• Soukous. Soukous is a form of music that stems from rumba.
• JuJu. Juju style originally came from Nigeria, a country which has produced many styles that managed to spread all around West African countries, including juju, jaija, fuji, ozzidi, palm-wine, highlife and afrobeat.
• Mbalax.
• Zilin.
• Gnawa.
• Mbaqanga.
• Chimurenga.
• Majika.

bolon

Among the qualities of African music which may be considered characteristic, then, we may include the following: an emphasis on rhythmic and metric complexity expressed throughout the musical system; the use of extended syncopation, or off- beat phrasing of melodic accents, as a melodic device; the antiphonal call and …