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).
[2] Wood wrote the original version of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion as his Ph.D. dissertation, which won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association.
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.
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.
Wood's Black Majority gave rise to a tradition of scholarship on the African roots of rice cultivation in colonial America.
In addition, Wood's insights contributed to historians who have examined the continuities between African cultures and those the people created in different regions of the present-day United States.
It also influenced the work of the public historian Joseph Opala, who organized a series of notable "homecomings" to Sierra Leone for Gullah people.
The slave ships coming from Africa brought mosquitos which introduced malaria and yellow fever to the semi-tropical "low country" region bordering the South Carolina coast.