African American Lives : The Struggle for Freedom, Single Volume Edition

Rating:
Summary: Survey Text Humanizes African American History
Review: African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom, Single Volume Edition by Clayborne Carson (Longman) Alternate editions [Volume One Chapters One through Eleven; Volume Two Chapters Eleven Through Twenty-One] Excerpt: Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it maybe a physical one, or it maybe both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. -Frederick Douglass
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is designed to help students in the survey course gain an understanding of that struggle. It introduces the concepts, milestones, and significant figures of African American history. Inasmuch as that history is grounded in struggle-in the consistent and insistent call to the United States to make good on constitutional promises made to all its citizens-this book is also an American history text. Hence, the milestones of mainstream American history, economy, politics, arts and letters are interwoven in its pages.
But African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom seeks to do something more. It engages the reader in viewing history through the lens of many biographies and through the perspectives of people who lived those struggles to ensure, in the words of Langston Hughes' famous poem, that "America Will Be." This unique biographical approach to African American history positions African American lives at the center of the narrative and as the basis of analysis.
BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom tells the stories of the lives of both the illustrious (abolitionist Martin Delany) and the ordinary (planter Isaiah Montgomery), the public and the private perspectives of those who shaped the African American story. Some individuals are famous for their specific contributions; other individuals are representative of a larger idea, a concept of a people who have inhabited the American continent for more than half a millennium.
Throughout the book we examine the struggles of African Americans to define their own identities, the development of nationalist ideas and rhetoric, Americans' struggle with the concept of race, and the growth of the politics of race from the Republican Party to the Rainbow Coalition. Wherever possible, we enliven and give authenticity to the story through the words of contemporary participants. With all that, we keep the story concise, fast-paced, and compelling.
Within these pages, we try to capture the essence of the African American experience. The book presents African American voices; it sees history through African American eyes. The events and the themes around which these lives were organized are defined so as to impose order on the often disorderly past and to interpret that past as modern historical research has revealed it. The biographical approach both guides the story and animates the history In each chapter, individual African Americans are the pivot points that provide a window on the historical changes of their generation. Life stories capture the rush of events that envelop individuals and illuminate the momentous decisions that, collectively, frame the American past and present.
While humanizing history, the biographical approach has another important advantage: It is an antidote to the poisonous notion of historical inevitability. Too often, expressions such as the sweep of history, the transit of civilization, manifest destiny, and the march of progress plant the idea that history is inexorable, unalterable, and foreordained-beyond the capacity of men and women to change. That idea has been used to justify a winner's history-an approach that diminishes the full humanness of those who were captured and traded as slaves. Books with a winner's history approach also work to absolve those who traded in slaves and profited from their labor. To promote the understanding that no individual is forever trapped within iron circumstances beyond his or her ability to alter, we ground every chapter in the experience of people rather than forces.
The interwoven human stories in this textbook demonstrate that in every age, in every part of the country, at every level of society, African Americans refused to allow history to crush them. Instead, they were shakers and shapers of their own world insofar as this was possible. Whether in the small space of plantation quarters or Harlem walkups, or criss-crossing a nation, or calling for the unity of Africans dispossessed and dispersed around the globe, African Americans have shaped their world even as they contested and transformed their subordinate roles in American society. That often they did not succeed in their plans or could not fully realize their hopes does not diminish their strivings. It does not alter the fact that for many, nothing was passively accepted; everything was contested or negotiated. The struggle for dignity and respect is part of the human condition. It has been no different for a dispossessed African American minority determined to transcend the contempt of their fellow Americans.
Just as African American lives are inarguably part of the long process by which Americans have strived to achieve the promise of the national motto E pluribus unum-from the many, one-so too African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is not a story set in stone. It is the product of our constantly changing understandings of the past, new insights about historical possibilities, and new historical research. In that ongoing effort, African American history has achieved breadth and depth in recent decades, indeed has become one of the most vibrant components of American history, reshaping the way we understand everything from the American economy to innovations in science, politics, and the arts. Drawing on the last half-century of recast historical narrative, African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom crafts a new synthesis that not only enriches our understanding of the black experience in America but alters our conception of American history in the whole.
COVERAGE AND ORGANIZATION
In African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom, the distinctive people and events of American history are all here: the Europeans' first encounter with new people and a new environment, the American Revolution and its shaping of humanitarian ideals, the War of 1812, the Missouri Compromise, sectional conflicts, wars from the Civil War
through this century's war against terrorism, cultural trends from the resistance poetry of revolutionary-era Phillis Wheatley through modern-day hip hop.
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom corn-prises twenty-one chapters. Chapters 1-7 explore the period up to 1830, when most Africans in North America were enslaved. The book begins, as all human history begins, in Africa with ancient history and the rise of empires in West and Central Africa during the period American and western historians think of as the Middle Ages. European contact and the growth of the slave trade are followed by an analysis of the new conditions of slavery in the Americas. To understand how Africans were not all enslaved in the same ways and in the same conditions, the chapters treat the formation of notions about race and how they figured in the descent into slavery in different zones of European settlement-French, Dutch, and Spanish as well as English-in the Americas. The galvanizing effect of the American Revolution and the decades thereafter during which free black people in the North and in the South built families, founded churches, forged friendships and communities, and struggled for autonomy and dignity are central themes.
Chapters 8-14 examine pivotal junctures in African American history that parallel the American focus on reform and nationality. The 1830s marked the first years when the majority of black Americans were not forced immigrants but rather born on American soil. Echoing the religious reawakening that undergirded both abolitionism and a vigorous defense of slavery, slave and free African Americans alike claimed their voice in an international antebellum debate about the future of American democracy. Then, through a long and merciless Civil War, the end of slavery, and the South's attempt to recreate the essence of slavery, black Americans persisted in holding forth, before white Americans and the world, the guarantees of equality and citizenship built into the new constitutional amendments. The post-Civil War dispersal of newly freed African Americans to every corner of North America shows how, in the face of a still-hostile white America that abandoned Reconstruction, black people built families, communities, and viable economic lives; established churches, mutual aid and literary societies, and businesses; and launched schools and publishing ventures as they sought to transform themselves from slaves to soldiers and citizens and to wrest equality and justice from white America.
Chapters 15-21 address African American life in mod-ern America. We devote attention to the increasing diversity of African Americans and how-during world wars, the Great Depression, and other momentous national and inter-national transformations-they struggled for full participation in a society still marred by racist attitudes and practices. Throughout twentieth-century scientific, technological, and
sources, visual material, historical essays, and personal interpretations.
Visual History: Each chapter includes a complement of graphic materials and illustrations-maps, charts, photographs, lithographs, and paintings-that provide a visual window on the past. These visual materials are intended to unfold an additional dimension of the narrative, reinforcing the student's sense of seeing history as participants saw it. To sharpen complex or subtle concepts, tables efficiently convey a sequence of events or milestones-for example, judicial decisions, legislative acts, and protest movement flashpoints.
economic changes, one theme permeates African American strategies for securing justice and equal opportunity: the ongoing struggle for a positive sense of identity amidst racism and destructive racial stereotypes. Whether in fighting the nation's wars; helping build the modern economy; adding to the explosion of cultural creativity through innovations in music, art, film, dance, and literature; or emerging on the political stage at the local, state, and national level, African Americans in the last century are portrayed as the principal innovators of the nation's most important liberation movement.
SPECIAL FEATURES AND PEDAGOGY
Complementing the multitude of stories connecting African American lives and American history, this book has several features we consider essential elements of a braided analytic narrative.
First Persons: Each chapter contains several primary documents called "First Person" that bring authentic firsthand accounts from the past to the page. These written and spoken words help us comprehend, as no modern paraphraser can do, how African Americans such as Olaudah Equiano, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Pauli Murray understood their world and sought to transform it. A headnote puts each primary document in context. Many documents end with a reference to the book's companion website (www.ablongman.com/ carson/documents), encouraging students to view a longer version of the document online.
Timelines: Timelines help students fix the most significant developments in African American history as they are framed in the larger, more familiar American story. These are positioned at the beginning of each chapter directly following an opening vignette.
Chapter-opening Vignettes: Focusing on personal stories such as the rebelliousness of Venture Smith or the wartime experience of First Lieutenant Thomas Edward Jones, these vignettes draw students into the chapter period and herald the chapter's events and themes.
Conclusions: A summary of the main ideas and events of each chapter, and a look ahead to the next, can be found in the Conclusion.
Further Reading: At the end of each chapter are suggestions for further reading. Here we provide a sampling, rather than an exhaustive list, of fresh histories as well as classics, engaging autobiographies and historical novels students can explore for primary