ABSTRACT
Slavery, Herbert Aptheker once observed, was the cause of slave insurrections. As sensible as that remark now appears, it was anything but commonplace in 1945, when Aptheker first published his pioneering American Negro Slave Revolts. Written at a time when the historiography of slavery was dominated—at least by white scholars at leading white universities—by college texts that referred to African Americans as “sambos” and racist scholars like U. B. Phillips (whose American Negro Slavery Aptheker punned into his own title), the very idea that enslaved workers might have resisted their chains was regarded as absurd by mainstream academe.
