African-American history

What has come to be known as "Black history" (also known as African-American history) developed out of the same forces that shaped the Civil Rights Movement. While African-Americans and their African ancestors played a central role in creating and defining the United States, these Americans had few people to tell their stories. Some noted scholars, such as W.E.B. Dubois, shed light on the African-American experience. But that experience was often ignored by white historians.

By the end of the 19th Century, African-Americans were commonly depicted in derogatory ways. The days of slavery were portrayed as a time when black people were happy and content. And many historians came to view the aftermath of the Civil War as a tragic time when blacks and carpet-baggers ran wild. In this history, it was the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) that came to save the day.

This portrayal of African-Americans was popularized by filmmaker D.W. Griffith in the Birth of a Nation. The 1915 film glorified the KKK. But it was a view that dominated film and literature into the 1930s when Gone with the Wind offered a romantic story of the Old South full of blacks who appeared content to play inferior roles.

Black history attempted to reverse centuries of ignorance. While black historians were not alone in advocating a new examination of slavery and racism in the United States, the study of African-American history has often been a political and scholarly struggle to change assumptions.

One of the foremost assumptions was that slaves were passive and did not rebel. For decades, historians sought to find explanations for this alleged reality. Eventually, a series of historians transformed the image of African-Americans, revealing a much richer and complex experience. Historians, such as Leon Littwack, showed how former slaves fought to keep their families together and struggled against tremendous odds to define themselves as free people. Others wrote of rebellions small and large.

In the Twenty-First Century, black history is regarded as mainstream and is celebrated every February in the United States during "Black History Month."

Bibliography

Surveys

• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (2000)
• Finkenbine, Roy E. Sources of the African-American Past: Primary Sources in American History (2nd Edition) (2003)
• Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred Moss, From Slavery to Freedom. A History of African Americans, (2001), standard textbook; first edition in 1947
• Hine, Darlene Clark, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Elsa Barkley Brown, eds. Black Women in America - An Historical Encyclopedia, (2005)
• Hine, Darlene Clark, et al. The African-American Odyssey (2nd ed. 2002) textbook
• Holt, Thomas C. ed. Major Problems in African-American History: From Freedom to "Freedom Now," 1865-1990s (2000) reader in primary and secondary sources
• Lowery, Charles D. and John F. Marszalek, eds. Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Present (1992) online edition
• Mandle, Jay R. Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience since the Civil War (1992) online edition
• Arwin D Smallwood, The Atlas of African-American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times (1997)
• Walker, Juliet E. K. Encyclopedia of African American Business History (1999) online edition

Emancipation and Reconstruction Era: 1860-1890

see the longer Bibliography at Reconstruction

• Bentley George R. A History of the Freedmen's Bureau (1955)
• Butchart, Ronald E. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen's Education, 1862-1875 (1980) onlineedition
• Carpenter, John A. Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard (1999) online edition
• Cimbala, Paul A. and Trefousse, Hans L. (eds.) The Freedmen's Bureau: Reconstructing the American South After the Civil War. 2005.
• Click, Patricia C. Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony, 1862-1867 (2001) online edition
• Crouch, Barry. The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans (1992)
• Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. "The Freedmen's Bureau" (1901)] by leading black scholar online edition
• Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935)
• Durrill, Wayne K. "Political Legitimacy and Local Courts: 'Politicks at Such a Rage' in a Southern Community during Reconstruction" in Journal of Southern History, Vol. 70 #3, 2004 pp 577-617 online edition
• Foner Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), the standard history of Reconstruction.
• Gerteis, Louis S. From Contraband to Freedmen: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861-1865 (1973).
• Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)
• Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985)
• Kolchin, Peter. First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction 1972.
• Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. 1979,
• Morris, Robert C. Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870 1981.
• Oubre, Claude F. Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Land Ownership 1978.
• Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War'. (1953) by leading African American historian
• Slave Emancipation Through the Prism of Archives Records (1997) by Joseph P. Reidy
• Richardson, Joe M. Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 1986.
• Richter, William L. Overreached on All Sides: The Freedmen's Bureau Administrators in Texas, 1865-1868 1991.
• Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (1978)
• Span, Christopher M. "'I Must Learn Now or Not at All': Social and Cultural Capital in the Educational Initiatives of Formerly Enslaved African Americans in Mississippi, 1862-1869," The Journal of African American History, 2002 pp 196-222
• Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877. (1965)
• Ransom, Roger L. Conflict and Compromise. (1989), econometric history
• Oubre, Claude F. Forty Acres and a Mule. (1978).
• Rodrigue, John C. "Labor Militancy and Black Grassroots Political Mobilization in the Louisiana Sugar Region, 1865-1868" in Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67 #1, 2001 pp 115-45; online edition also in JSTOR
• Schwalm, Leslie A. "'Sweet Dreams of Freedom': Freedwomen's Reconstruction of Life and Labor in Lowcountry South Carolina," Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 #1, 1997 pp 9-32 online edition
• Williamson, Joel. After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 1965.
• Freedmen's Bureau in Texas

Primary sources

• Berlin, Ira, ed. Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (1995)
• Freedman's Bureau Online
• General Howard's report for 1869: The House of Representatives, Forty-first Congress, second session
• Reports and Speeches

Jim Crow: 1890-1954

• Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (1988) online edition
• Bayor, Ronald H. Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (1996)
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later (2003)
• Bullock, Henry Allen. A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present (1967)
• Cartwright, Joseph H. The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s (1976)
• Fields, Barbara J. "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson , eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (1982),
• Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971),
• Gatewood, Jr., Willard B. Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898-1903 (1975)
• Gatewood, Jr., Willard B. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (2000)
• Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)
• Harlan. Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1900 (1972) the standard biography, vol 1
• Harlan. Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee 1901-1915 (1983), the standard scholarly biography vol 2 online edition vol 2
• Harlan. Louis R. Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan (1988) online edition
• Harlan. Louis R. "The Secret Life of Booker T. Washington." Journal of Southern History 37#3 (1971). pp 393-416 Documents Booker T. Washington's secret financing and directing of litigation against segregation and disfranchisement. in JSTOR
• Linda O. Mcmurry. George Washington Carver, Scientist and Symbol (1982)
• Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985)
• Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. DuBois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race (1993). vol 1, winner of Pulitzer Prize; W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 (2000) vol 2
• Logan, Frenise A. The Negro in North Carolina, 1876-1894 (1964),
• Logan, Rayford. The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (Originally Published as: The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir: 1877-1901) (1970)
• McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989).
• Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (1963),
• Meier, August. "Toward a Reinterpretation of Booker T. Washington." 23 Journal of Southern History 22#2 (1957) in JSTOR
• Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3d ed., 1974), [ in ACLS E-books]
• Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 ( 1951)
• Cary D. Wintz, African American Political Thought, 1890-1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph (1996)

=Historiography

• Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (1986)
• Rabinowitz, Howard N. "More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow", Journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 842-56. in JSTOR

See also

• Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement
• Black history in Puerto Rico
• Nicodemus, Kansas

External links

• Library of Congress - African American History and Culture
• Encyclopedia Britannica - Guide to Black History
• Missouri State Archives - African American History Initiative
• Tennessee Technological University - African-American History and Studies
• "They Closed Our Schools," the story of Massive Resistance and the closing of the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools