Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow - Tapa blanda

Críticas

Snyder's lucidly written and passionately argued story of the making of black history offers a timely and compelling reminder of how much the writing of our racial past has shaped the present and future of America. The struggles for a black archive and against historical erasure in the pathbreaking scholarship of Carter G. Woodson, John Hope Franklin, and others is part of the foundation upon which the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture rests. Their commitment to telling--and learning--what Woodson called the 'whole truth' should be shared by every American and immigrant alike.--Khalil Gibran Muhammad "author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America " Making Black History is an original, deeply-researched, and thoughtful account of Carter G. Woodson and the founding of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder does a particularly fine job of situating the origins of African American history as a discipline against the backdrop of larger struggles for racial justice in the twentieth century. In the process, he raises key questions about the relationship between politics and history, and the potential for scholarly inquiry into the past to improve African Americans' current and future life chances. Snyder writes with nuance, clarity, and precision. Making Black History will no doubt be of great interest to scholars of public history and memory, education, and African American culture and politics.--Hilary J. Moss "author of Schooling Citizens: The African American Struggle for Education in Antebellum America "

Reseña del editor

In the Jim Crow era, along with black churches, schools, and newspapers, African Americans also had their own history. Making Black History focuses on the engine behind the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Author Jeffrey Aaron Snyder shows how the study and celebration of black history became an increasingly important part of African American life over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century. It was the glue that held African Americans together as "a people," a weapon to fight racism, and a roadmap to a brighter future.

Making Black History takes an expansive view of the historical enterprise, covering not just the production of black history but also its circulation, reception, and performance. Woodson, the only professional historian whose parents had been born into slavery, attracted a strong network of devoted members to the ASNLH, including professional and lay historians, teachers, students, "race" leaders, journalists, and artists. They all grappled with a set of interrelated questions: Who and what is "Negro"? What is the relationship of black history to American history? And what are the purposes of history? Tracking the different answers to these questions, Snyder recovers a rich public discourse about black history that took shape in journals, monographs, and textbooks and sprang to life in the pages of the black press, the classrooms of black schools, and annual celebrations of Negro History Week. By lining up the Negro history movement's trajectory with the wider arc of African American history, Snyder changes our understanding of such signal aspects of twentieth-century black life as segregated schools, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emerging modern civil rights movement.