HIST 2060: African American History

The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.

A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
2021 NAACP Image Award Nominee: Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction
Honorable Mention for the 2021 Organization of American Historians Darlene Clark Hine Award

A powerful illustrated history of the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop. Making Our Way Home explores issues like voting rights, domestic terrorism, discrimination, and segregation alongside the flourishing of arts and culture, activism, and civil rights.

One Drop explores the extent to which historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference. Featuring the perspectives of 60 contributors representing 25 countries and combining candid narratives with striking portraiture, this book provides living testimony to the diversity of Blackness.

A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.

In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine Black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million Black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers’ personal experiences.

Drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and research, Neil A. Wynn combines narrative history and primary sources as he locates the World War II years within the long-term struggle for African Americans' equal rights.

In Between Slavery and Freedom, Julie Winch explores the complex world of those people of African birth or descent who occupied the “borderlands” between slavery and freedom in the 350 years from the founding of the first European colonies in what is today the United States to the start of the Civil War.

Drawing on deep archival research and interviews with key participants, Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar reconsiders the commingled stories of -- and popular reactions to -- the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and mainstream civil rights leaders. This updated edition of Ogbar's classic work contains a new preface that describes the book's genesis and links the Black Power movement to the Black Lives Matter movement.

In this cohesive narrative, Edward Countryman explores the American Revolution in the context of the African American experience, asking a question that Blacks have raised since the Revolution: What does the revolutionary promise of freedom and democracy mean for African Americans? Countryman, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, draws on extensive research and primary sources to help him answer this question.

West offers an overview of the lives of enslaved women in America by using a broad chronological perspective, considering themes and issues in their lives from the colonial era through to the end of the Civil War.

In the epic tradition of Eyes on the Prize and with the cultural significance of John Lewis's March trilogy, an ambitious and harrowing account of the devoted Black educators who battled southern school segregation and inequality.