The Southern Awakenings were a climax to a long period of intensive racial interaction, and, as a result, the culture of Americans--blacks and whites--was deeply affected by African values and perceptions. The interpenetration of Western and African values took place very early, beginning with the large-scale importation of Africans into the South in the last decades of the seventeenth century. In spite of a significant interpenetration of values between the two races, the whites were usually unaware of their own change in this process. Nevertheless, in perceptions of time, in esthetics, in approaches to ecstatic religious experience and to understanding the Holy Spirit, in ideas of the afterworld and of the proper ways to honor the spirits of the dead, African influence was deep and far-reaching.