在最近的过去，对美国奴隶制的研究投入了巨大的创造力，主要探索了非洲文化对美国黑人文化的影响程度，并对奴隶文化作为非裔美国人进行了几乎全新的评估。然而，伴随着对引入美国的非洲价值观的新认识，人们自然而然地认为白人传统会影响黑人传统。在这种观点中，尽管奴隶制度被视为重要的制度，但黑人通常不会被视为演员，他们的“不同文化”也不会被视为对白人产生了广泛的影响。从事这一领域研究的历史学家通常认为美国有两种社会制度，一种是黑人，一种是白人，奴隶和主人之间存在文化差异。
这本书的主题是，黑人、非洲人和非裔美国人深刻地影响了白人的观念、价值观和身份认同，尽管存在着两种世界观，但如果我们要理解其中一种或两种，就必须探索它们之间的深层共生关系。这种探索提出了许多问题，并提出了许多可能性和可能性，但它也确定了白人和黑人在奴隶制体系中的混合程度，以及由此产生的文化互动的广泛程度。
The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia
In the recent past, enormous creative energy has gone into the study of American slavery, with major explorations of the extent to which African culture affected the culture of black Americans and with an almost totally new assessment of slave culture as Afro-American. Accompanying this new awareness of the African values brought into America, however, is an automatic assumption that white traditions influenced black ones. In this view, although the institution of slaver is seen as important, blacks are not generally treated as actors nor is their “divergent culture” seen as having had a wide-ranging effect on whites. Historians working in this area generally assume two social systems in America, one black and one white, and cultural divergence between slaves and masters.
It is the thesis of this book that blacks, Africans, and Afro-Americans, deeply influenced white’s perceptions, values, and identity, and that although two world views existed, there was a deep symbiotic relatedness that must be explored if we are to understand either or both of them. This exploration raises many questions and suggests many possibilities and probabilities, but it also establishes how thoroughly whites and blacks intermixed within the system of slavery and how extensive was the resulting cultural interaction.
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