Black History: New Scholarship (HC)

Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region's history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally.

Felwine Sarr urges the continent to set out on its own renewal and self-discovery--an active utopia that requires a deep historical reflection on the continent's vast mythological universe and ancient traditions, nourishes a cultural reinvention, and embraces green technologies.

A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill Vaughan (1828-1893) set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father's wish that he leave America to start a new life in Africa. Tracing Vaughan's journey from South Carolina to Liberia to several parts of Nigeria, Lindsay documents this "free" man's struggle to find economic and political autonomy in an era when freedom was not clear and unhindered anywhere for people of African descent.

The Sahara Desert was a thriving crossroads of exchange for West Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe in the medieval period. Fueling this exchange was West African gold, prized for its purity and used for minting currencies and adorning luxury objects such as jewelry, textiles, and religious objects.

Beginning with ancient Egypt, this volume focuses on the figure of the Black. The aesthetic traditions illustrated here are as diverse as the political and social histories of these regions. From Igbo Mbari sculptures to modern photography from Mali, from Indian miniatures to Japanese prints, African and Asian artists portrayed the black body in ways distinct from the European tradition, even as they engaged with Western art through the colonial encounter and the forces of globalization.

In recent years researchers, both affiliated and independent, have done exciting new research on Black people in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and even earlier. This book gathers this new work on people and events into a single, innovative volume.

Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-20th century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps. The author mines writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. They expandied the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, imagining new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices.

Carretta has assembled a comprehensive anthology of writings by 18th century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of Blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa-between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties.

Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country's postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution.

An independent kingdom of runaway slaves founded in the late 16th century, Angola Janga was a beacon of freedom in a land plagued with oppression. In stark black ink and chiaroscuro panel compositions, D'Salete brings history to life in this graphic novel; the painful stories of fugitive slaves on the run, the brutal raids by Portuguese colonists, and the tense power struggles within this precarious kingdom. Angola Janga sheds light on a long-overlooked moment of resistance against oppression.

David Wheat establishes an early phase of the "Africanization" of the Spanish Caribbean two centuries before the rise of large-scale sugar plantations. With African migrants and their descendants comprising demographic majorities in core areas of Spanish settlement, Luso-Africans, Afro-Iberians, Latinized Africans, and free people of color acted more as colonists or settlers. These ethnically mixed and economically diversified societies constituted a region of overlapping Iberian and African worlds, while they made possible Spain's colonization of the Caribbean.

Offers a comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of color made for colonial officials and planter elites during the late-eighteenth century. This book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. Online access available on Tripod.

In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910.

Les Payne, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism.

Tells the full story of the emergence, queer remediation, and memorialization of house in Chicago from its beginnings in the late '70s to the present. Salkind argues that this adaptation of house music by crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that it is invoked and mobilized as an archive of collectivity and congregation. As such, the book considers house music's liberatory potential in terms of its genre-defiant repertoire. Ultimately, the book argues that even as house music culture has been appropriated and exploited, the music's porosity and flexibility have allowed it to remain what pioneering Chicago DJ Craig Cannon calls a "musical Stonewall" for queers and people of color in the Windy City and around the world.

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume "community" history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics.

The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools.

Even though slavery had been outlawed in New York by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, and police who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers. This account documents capitalism's ties to slavery, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, and the strength of Black activism.

In this book, Richard Kent Evans tells the story of MOVE -- a story that has been virtually lost outside of Philadelphia. What was MOVE? Many MOVE members thought of themselves as belonging to a religion, and they sought legal recognition. But to others, including other religious groups and, more importantly, the courts, MOVE was anything but a religion. Evans dives deep into how we decide what constitutes a genuine religious tradition, and the enormous consequences of that decision.

Shawn Michelle Smith traces how historical moments of racial crisis come to be known photographically and how the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium in contemporary art. Artists turns to the past--whether by using nineteenth-century techniques to produce images or by re-creating iconic historic photographs--as a way to use history to negotiate the present and to call attention to the unfinished political project of racial justice in the United States.

Words and photographs tell the story of the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, The words are Bobby Seale's, with contributions from Kathleen Cleaver and many others; the photographs range from the party's charismatic leaders to its daily work in African American communities.

The abolition of slavery after the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery. Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism, while showing how African-Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a 'New Negro' to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to the United States.

** Community Suggestion** The fight for racial equality in the 19th century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture spread throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics.

In his engrossing history, Trotter charts the black working class's vast contributions to the making of America for the last 400 years. At the center are the actual experiences of African American men and women that chronicle remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks