Volume 1 (268 pages). Volume 2 (266 pages). This two-volume set of books is like taking a course in African American research. They even include exercises, so you can practice what you learn. Volume 1 focuses on researching African Americans in the 1900s, including what records exists and where to find them. Volume 2 focuses on pre-1900 resources and where to find them. You will be surprised at the scope of records, which can give you information about your ancestors. The author also includes research strategies and evaluating the the reliability of what you find. View More...
Discusses the upper-class African American organizations such as the Boule, Jack and Jill, and the Links, and looks at their history, contributions to society, and the traditions and customs.
A boy named Peter, born to a slave in Massachusetts in 1763, was sold nineteen months later to a childless white couple there. This book recounts the fascinating history of how the American Revolution came to Peter's small town, how he joined the revolutionary army at the age of twelve, and how he participated in the battles of Bunker Hill and Yorktown and witnessed the surrender at Saratoga.Joyce Lee Malcolm describes Peter's home life in rural New England, which became increasingly unhappy as he grew aware of racial differences and prejudices. She then relates how he and other blacks, slave ... View More...
In 1966 in South Africa, Sandra Laing, 10, was reclassified as "Coloured" and expelled from her white boarding school and taken home by police to her white, pro-apartheid family. Her case has received national and international news coverage over the years, including in a documentary film.
The Clamorgan clan traces to the family patriarch Jacques Clamorgan, a French adventurer of questionable ethics who bought up, or at least claimed to have bought up, huge tracts of land around St. Louis. On his death, he bequeathed his holdings to his mixedrace, illegitimate heirs, setting off nearly two centuries of litigation. The result is a window on a remarkable family that by the early twentieth century variously claimed to be black, Creole, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Jewish, and white. The historian Julie Winch uses her sweeping, multigenerational history of the unforgettable Clamorgan... View More...
In 1877, Henry O. Flipper became the first African-American graduate of West Point. 2nd LT Flipper was assigned to the 10th Cavalry--one of four all-black units (known as Buffalo Soldiers) sent to the western frontier. While serving at Fort Davis Texas Henry was accused of embezzlement. In1882 he received a court martial and dishonorable discharge. Although he had a success civilian life, he spent much of his time trying to reverse his discharge. He died in 1940 unsuccessful at clearing his name. In 1976, his military record was finally cleared to an honorable discharge. View More...
Black folk have played an important role in this state's history from the time of the first exploration led by the Spanish and are a vital force in shaping the future of Oklahoma. The full story needs to be told so that both black and white Oklahomans may have a better, more viable understanding of the past and of this morning's headlines.
Not much was expected from the Fifteenth New York Voluntary Infantry, made up in great part by African American waiters, porters, and doormen from Harlem, but the group came to be known as the Hell Fighters during the fierce fighting of World War I. He briefly describes key skirmishes, notes the awards and medals won, and shows the contrast between the menial postwar duties (finding dismembered limbs on the battlefield) and the glorious homecoming parade in New York City.
Lieutenant Commander Michael Nolden Henderson, U.S. Navy retired, captures the attention of genealogists, historians, and others interested in the complex social structure that developed during the French and Spanish colonial periods in Louisiana. He explores forbidden relationships that spawned the unique heritage of Creoles of color. Referencing documents from as far back as the 1770s, Henderson uses his own experiences as a family history researcher and the insight of notes scholars to reveal the methods, standards, and techniques used to prove his ancestry. Additionally, his efforts led to... View More...
Author Opal Lee, a 96-year-old activist, wrote this children's book about how African Americans were freed from slavery after the Civil War. She explains how slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned on June 19 that they were free, more than two years after President Lincoln had freed them. Opal Lee is considered the Grandmother of Juneteenth. Because of her crusade, it was made a national holiday in 1921. View More...
Author Opal Lee, a 96-year-old activist, wrote this children's book about how African Americans were freed from slavery after the Civil War. She explains how slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned on June 19 that they were free, more than two years after President Lincoln had freed them. Opal Lee is considered the Grandmother of Juneteenth. Because of her crusade, it was made a national holiday in 1921. View More...
In Daughters of Men, author Rachel Vassel has compiled dozens of stunning photographs and compelling personal essays about African-American women and their fathers. Whether it's a father who mentors his daughter's artistic eye by taking her to cultural events or one who unwaveringly supports a risky career move, the fathers in this book each had his own unique and successful style of parenting. The first book to showcase the importance of the black father's impact on the accomplishments of his daughter, Daughters of Men provides an intimate look at black fatherhood and the many ways fathers ha... View More...
Because Texas emerged from the western frontier relatively late in the formation of the antebellum nation, it is frequently and incorrectly perceived as fundamentally western in its political and social orientation. In fact, most of the settlers of this area were emigrants from the South, and many of these people brought with them their slaves and all aspects of slavery as it had matured in their native states.In An Empire for Slavery, Randolph B. Campbell examines slavery in the antebellum South's newest state and reveals how significant slavery was to the history of Texas. The "peculiar inst... View More...
The laws that governed the institution of slavery in early Texas were enacted over a fifty-year period in which Texas moved through incarnations as a Spanish colony, a Mexican state, an independent republic, a part of the United States, and a Confederate state. This unusual legal heritage sets Texas apart from the other slave-holding states and provides a unique opportunity to examine how slave laws were enacted and upheld as political and legal structures changed. Combining seminal historical essays with excerpts from key legal documents from the slave period and tying them together with inte... View More...
This children's book is based on a true story about Jim Limber, a young African American boy who lived with Confederate President Jefferson Davis's family in the Confederacy capitol in Richmond, Virginia. Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote in her diary in 1864 about seeing Jim in the Davis home dressed in clothing belonging to the Davis's young son Joe. Other historical sources valid that the orphan child was part of the Davis family until Jefferson Davis was arrested at the end of the war. Interesting book, even though it is written for children. View More...
The History of Mary Prince (1831) was the first narrative of a black woman to be published in Britain. It describes Prince's sufferings as a slave in Bermuda, Turks Island and Antigua, and her eventual arrival in London with her brutal owner Mr. Wood in 1828. Prince escaped from him and sought assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society, where she dictated her remarkable story to Susanna Strickland (later Moodie). A moving and graphic document, The History drew attention to the continuation of slavery in the Caribbean, despite an 1807 Act of Parliament officially ending the slave trade. 114 Page... View More...
It is a slave narrative of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery, and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, as well as describing at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana. 336 p. & View More...
Steven M. Stowe examines three types of ritual central to the elite planter culture of the pre-Civil War South: the affair of honor, courtship, and coming of age. Using these rituals as formal "maps" of Southern culture, Stowe shows how each embodies themes of authority, sexuality, and kinship, and he explores the full significance of such events as duels, cotillions, and the departure of a young person for school. In private lives these social rituals were embraced or resisted and ultimately shaped into everyday experience. Stowe's biographies of three families show that the boundaries of pri... View More...
Focusing on Petersburg, Virginia, Professor Lebsock is able to demonstrate and explain how the status of women could change for the better in an antifeminist environment. She weaves the experiences of individual women together with general social trends, to show, for example, how women's lives were changing in response to the economy and the institutions of property ownership and slavery.
Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America's first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful beauty company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes. Renowned author Alex Haley became fascinated by the story of this extraordinary heroine, and before his death in 1992, he embarked on the research and outline of a major novel based on her life. With The Black Rose, critically acclaimed writer Tananarive Due brings Haley's work to an inspiring completion.Blending documented history, v... View More...
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, was a fervent member of New England's abolitionist movement, an active participant in the Underground Railroad, and part of a group that supplied material aid to John Brown before his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. When the Civil War broke out, Higginson was commissioned as a colonel of the black troops training in the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas. 296 pages, indexed. View More...
As many African American researchers have discovered, they likely won't find anything good being said in a White newspaper about a Black person unless it is bad. And that's what makes African American newspapers so valuable. These newspapers provide the history and context of the times in which your ancestor lived by covering social events (marriages, deaths, visitors, parties) and other news that is of importance to the African American community. The author tells you how to find these newspapers (online and as hard copies) as well as research tips. View More...
this book is about how it felt to be a slave: to be owned by another person, as a car; to live a a piece of property; to be considered not human; to be a thing, determined by the person who owned you. All aspects of slavery are described by those who lived as slaves View More...
Book's introduction: "In 1867, a tiny unpretentious volume appeared in American bookstores...it was the groundbreaking work...in being the first extensive collection on Negro folklore." The book starts with a 42-page introduction giving some history on background on the songs. The book has words and music for 136 songs, which are separated by area: Southern Eastern Sea States, including South Carolina, Georgia and Sea Islands; Northern Seaboard Slave States, including Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina; Inland Slave States, including Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi River; Gulf... View More...
Negro soldiers who wanted to remain in the United States Army after the Civil War were organized into the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments. Their service in controlling hostile Indians on the Great Plains during the next twenty years was as invaluable as it was unrecognized.
Negro soldiers who wanted to remain in the United States Army after the Civil War were organized into the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments. Their service in controlling hostile Indians on the Great Plains during the next twenty years was as invaluable as it was unrecognized.
Wilma King sheds light on a long-overlooked aspect of slavery in the United States - the wretched lives of the millions of young people enslaved in the nineteenth-century South. A substantial body of scholarship examines the history of U.S. slavery, but it has not focused on these children and their place in enslaved families and the slave community. Wilma King argues that childhood was stolen from these youngsters - they were forced into the workplace at an early age, subjected to arbitrary plantation authority and punishment, and were separated from family. For this exhaustive study, King dr... View More...
