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Ivan Van Sertima author of "They Came Before Columbus" (1976) was inspired by Harvard professor Leo Wiener’s 1920 book "Africa and the Discovery of America." The book was an example of the “diffusionist” school of thinking which held that cultural traits in general, and in this case African traits in particular, tended to migrate around the globe rather than springing up separately and spontaneously in different cultures.
Wiener was born in Białystok (then in the Russian Empire), of Lithuanian Jewish origin.[1] His father was Zalmen (Solomon) Wiener,[2][3] and his mother was Frejda Rabinowicz. He studied at the University of Warsaw in 1880, and then at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.[4] Wiener later declared, "Having 'for many years been a member of the Unitarian Church,' and having 'preached absolute amalgamation with the Gentile surroundings', [I] 'never allied with the Jewish Church or with Jews as such."[1]
Wiener left Europe with the plan of founding a vegetarian commune in British Honduras (now Belize). He sailed steerage to New Orleans. On his arrival, in 1880, he had no money.[5] After travel and work around the US, he went to Kansas City, Missouri, and became a lecturer in the department of Germanic and Romance languages at the University of Kansas.[6] He was a polyglot, and was reputed to speak thirty languages well.[7]
Wiener published articles on Yiddish linguistic elements in Polish, German, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. In 1898, Wiener traveled to Europe to collect material for his book The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899). Isaac Peretz encouraged him and Abraham Harkavy, librarian at the Asiatic Museum of St. Petersburg, presented him with a thousand Yiddish books, which formed the basis of the Yiddish collection of the Harvard University library. After this project Wiener's interest in Yiddish declined.
Beginning in 1896, Wiener lectured on Slavic cultures at Harvard University and became the first American professor of Slavic literature. He compiled a valuable anthology of Russian literature and translated 24 volumes of Leo Tolstoy's works into English,[8] a task which he completed in 24 months.[9] He taught George Rapall Noyes.
Major works
•French Words in Wolfram Von Eschenbach. 1893.
•Popular poetry of the Russian Jews. 1898.
•The history of Yiddish literature in the nineteenth century. 1899.
•The Ferrara Bible. 1900.
•Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. 1902–1903.
•Gypsies as fortune-tellers and as blacksmiths. 1909.
•Philological fallacies: one in romance, another in Germanic. 1914.
•Commentary to the Germanic laws and mediaeval documents. 1915.
•An Interpretation of the Russian People. 1915.
•(translator) of Josef Svatopluk Machar's (1916). Magdalen.
•Contributions Toward a History of Arabico-Gothic Culture. 1917–1921.
•Africa and the discovery of America. 1922. Vols. I-III.
•The contemporary drama of Russia. 1924. The philological history of "tobacco" in America. 1925.
As for ADOS historians of Africana Americana the tradition goes back as least as far as William Cooper Nell though the likes of David Walker and Martin Delaney are more remembered.
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Let me assure you Wiener, unlike van Sertima (1976), is no easy read. It took me over half a year to struggle through Discovery my first year at university. It's chock full of useful information despite its heavyy diffusionist bent. It is not Afrocentic as it makes Arabs responsible for transporting Africans to the Western Hemisphere.
Discovery's three volumes (vol 2 is the weakest) are available from Interent Archive while GoogleBooks has Mayan & Mexican. Download and devour only if you got googabs of time and an extensive background. Professors didn't play around back then. Their works are hardly penetrable especially to today's crowd of college babies and whiners failing courses and blaming it on their instructors.
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Pamplets I sold back in my vendor days in the early 1980s before African Studies was swamped by so-called Afrocentricism --which as far as I'm concerned is Black ethnocentricism.
Rufus L Perry The Cushite; or the children of Ham, the Negro race Brooklyn NY The Literary Union 1886
John Wm Norris The Ethiopian's Place in History and his contribution to the world's civilizations Baltimore 1916
George Wells Parker The Children of the Sun The Hamitic League of the World 1918
Josephine Carlisle Historic Sketches of the Ancient Negro Cambridge Mass The Cosmic Press 1920
All predate Wiener.
Then there was the, for its day and age, magnificent opus Drusilla Dunjee Houston Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire Book I Nations of the Cushite Empire. Marvelous facts from authentic records. Oklahoma City The Universal Publishing Co. 1926
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