Peter H. Wood

By proving that Africans contributed their sophisticated knowledge and skills to the building of America and not just their physical labor, Wood set a new tone in Southern historiography and opened an area of study. His book has been in print since it was first published in 1973. Wood's Black Majority gave rise to a tradition of scholarship on the African roots of rice cultivation in colonial America. It influenced the writings of other scholars, including Daniel C. Littlefield (Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina), Charles Joyner (Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community), Amelia Wallace Vernon (African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina), Julia Floyd Smith (Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia), Judith A. Carney (Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas), and Edda Fields-Black (Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the American Diaspora).

Wood married Ann Douglas in September 1965. They divorced, and Wood married Elizabeth A. Fenn in 1999.

Peter Hutchins Wood (born 1943 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American historian and author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974). It has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. He is a professor at Duke University in North Carolina.

Because of the diseases and the expansion of large rice and indigo plantations, with their need for many laborers, South Carolina had a "black majority" by about 1708. In addition, the continuing importation of slaves from the Rice Coast meant that the people were renewed from specific tribal cultures, rather than being mixed. This demographic environment is what enabled Africans in the low country to retain more of their cultural heritage than slaves elsewhere in North America. In addition, the slaves in the low country, and especially plantations of the Sea Islands, had much less contact with whites than did those in areas such as Virginia or North Carolina, where whites were in the majority. Before Wood conceived his "black majority" argument, the origin of Gullah culture was not well understood.

Wood wrote the original version of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion as his PhD dissertation, which was awarded a prize. Published in 1974, it was part of major revisions in the ways historians studied African-American history. At around the same time, a dozen major books were published on American slavery.

In Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), Wood showed that South Carolina rice planters during the Colonial Era chose enslaved Africans specifically from the "Rice Coast" of West Africa because of their expertise in rice cultivation and its technology. The African region stretched between what is now Senegal and Gambia in the north to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the south. African farmers in that region had been growing indigenous African rice for thousands of years and were experts in cultivating the difficult crop. They were also familiar with Asian rice, having obtained it via the trans-Saharan trade or through contact with early Portuguese shippers. Wood demonstrated that Africans from the Rice Coast brought the knowledge and technical skills to develop extensive cultivation that made rice one of the most lucrative industries in early America. They knew how to design and build the major earthworks: dams and irrigation systems for flooding and draining fields, that supported rice culture, as well as techniques for cultivation, harvesting and processing.