Life upon these shores : looking at African American history, 1513-2008

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Title:

Life upon these shores : looking at African American history, 1513-2008

Author:

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. author.

ISBN:

9780307593429

Publication Information:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Physical Description:

xvi, 487 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm.

Contents:

Origins, 1513-1760. African slaves, African conquistadors ; Origins of North American slavery ; From red to black slavery ; First Africans and the growth of northern slavery ; Royal African Company ; Early misgivings ; Fear and resistance ; Inoculation ; Fort Mose : a different trajectory -- Forging freedom, 1760-1804. First blooms ; Crispus Attucks and the freedom struggle ; Colored patriots ; The king's freedom ; Declaring independence ; Unleashing freedom ; Freedom, technology ; and king cotton ; Establishing freedom ; Creating a black Atlantic ; Toussaint! -- "It shall ever be our duty to vindicate our brethren," 1800-1834. Tracing the trade ; End of the slave trade in Britain and the United States, 1807 and 1808 ; Serving freedom in the War of 1812 ; Yarrow Mamout by Charles Wilson Peale and the rise of a people ; Colonization and Liberia ; "A fire bell in the night" ; Freedom's Journal and Walker's Appeal ; The Liberator and William Lloyd Garrison ; Nat Turner ; The founding of the American Anti-slavery Society and Maria Stewart ; British emancipation -- Race and resistance, 1834-1850. Oberlin College ; Magician and ventriloquist ; Julia Chinn ; An uncompromising talent ; Opposing black freedom ; The Amistad and the Creole ; Finding freedom in Massachusetts ; Frederick Douglass ; Crosscurrents of 1848 : French abolition and the Pearl ; Rush for gold ; Harriet Tubman, American icon ; The Roberts case and the birth of Jim Crow -- Emergence, 1850-1860. The new Fugitive Slave Law ; Resisting the Fugitive Slave Law ; Martin R. Delany and Harriet Beecher Stowe ; Institute for Colored Youth ; The Black Swan ; Clotel, or, The President's daughter, and Colored patriots of the American Revolution ; Anthony Burns ; John Mercer Langston and the bar of justice ; Berea College and Wilberforce University ; Dred Scott ; Our Nig -- War and its meaning, 1859-1865. Harpers Ferry ; "This is a white man's war!" ; Contraband ; The Port Royal experiment ; "An act for the release of certain persons held to service, or labor in the District of Columbia" ; Robert Smalls and the Planter ; President Lincoln and colonization ; First in the field ; Emancipation Proclamation ; Carnival of fury ; The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment ; Fort Pillow ; Extraordinary heroism : New Market Heights ; Defending rights in the midst of war ; Fruit of a bitter harvest : the Thirteenth Amendment ; First black voice in Congress ; Bureau of Refugees, Freemen and Abandoned Lands ; Freedman's Bank ; The Lincoln assassination -- Reconstructing a nation, 1866-1877. Formation of the Ku Klux Klan ; Civil Rights Act of 1866 ; Murder in Memphis, 1866 ; Fourteenth Amendment and black citizenship ; Reconstruction and black higher education ; Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution ; African American diplomats ; Hiram Rhodes Revels ; Blanche K. Bruce, Robert Smalls, and African Americans in Congress ; Harvard and Yale, 1870 and 1876 ; Civil Rights Act of 1871 : the Ku Klux Klan Act ; The decline of civil rights, 1875-1883 ; Fisk University Jubilee Singers ; Charlotte Ray ; U. S. Supreme Court and the Fourteenth Amendment : the slaughterhouse cases ; The Catholic Healys ; Convict lease ; End of reconstruction and ho for Kansas! -- "There is no Negro problem," 1877-1895. Black frontierspeople and cowboys ; The inventive Lewis H. Latimer ; Knights of Labor and Colored Farmers' Alliance ; Education and philanthropy in the nineteenth century ; Major league baseball and Jim Crow ; Mississippi Plan and black disenfranchisement ; Provident Hospital and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams ; Ida B. Wells-Barnett and lynching ; The World's Columbian Exposition and The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner ; W. E. B. Du Bois and Harvard University -- New Negro, old problem, 1895-1900. Booker T. Washington at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition ; Plessy v. Ferguson ; The National Association of Colored Women and the American Negro Academy ; Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898 ; Buffalo soldiers ; War with Spain and for an empire ; Afro-American Council ; W. E. B. Du Bois : the Paris Albums, 1900 ; Photo essay : Sambo Art ; Photo essay : the New Negro -- The ordeal of Jim Crow, 1900-1917. George H. White and the ordeal of black politics ; Dinner at the White House ; The music of Johnson, Johnson, and Cole ; Charles W. Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson ; Paul Laurence Dunbar and In Dahomey ; The Boston Guardian and the Chicago Defender ; The Souls of Black Folk ; Mary McLeod Bethune and African American education ; Niagara Movement ; The Atlanta riot, the Brownsville raid, and the reputations of Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington ; Springfield race riot, the founding of the NAACP, and the beginning of The Crisis ; Madam C. J. Walker ; Matthew Henson ; The founding of the Urban League, the Harlem attack and the death of Booker T. Washington ; Emancipation anniversary, Carter G. Woodson, Rosenwald Schools ; Jack Johnson and white America ; Woodrow Wilson and federal segregation -- Renaissance, 1917-1928. World War I and the great migration ; The Birth of a Nation, NAACP protests, and the founding of the second KKK ; Riots in East St. Louis and Houston, the response of the NAACP, 1917 ; Pan-African Congress ; The red summer, the Tulsa race riot, and more ; Marcus Mosiah Garvey ; Claude McKay and "If We Must Die" ; Sadie Alexander, Eva Dykes, Georgiana Simpson, and Bessie Coleman ; Harry Pace, Tanner and Fuller at the NYPL, Robeson in The Emperor Jones, Howard University Gallery of Art ; Schomburg Collection and Opportunity ; A. Philip Randolph, The Messenger, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters ; Alain Locke and the New Negro ; Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington ; Paul Robeson --

Growing authority, 1928-1939. Oscar De Priest and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. ; Scottsboro and Walter White ; Tuskegee syphilis study ; Etta Moten, Oliver Law, and William Hastie ; The Apollo Theatre ; National Negro Congress ; Jesse Owens and Joe Louis ; Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Richard Wright ; Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women, the National Youth Administration, and the Black Cabinet -- The era of World War II, 1939-1950. Marian Anderson performs at the Lincoln Memorial ; The March on Washington movement and Executive Order 8802 ; Moving toward the double v ; African Americans in the military during World War II ; The Tuskegee Airmen ; World War II-era race riots ; John H. Johnson, Ebony, and Jet ; The Congress of Racial Equality and the Journey of Reconciliation ; John Hope Franklin ; Jackie Robinson and black baseball ; Executive orders and To Secure These Rights ; The artistry of Gordon Parks -- Foundations of the new civil rights movement, 1950-1963. Breaking a barrier : Billy Eckstine ; Postwar accomplishments : Alice Coachman, Wesley Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Bunche ; Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation ; Invisible Man ; The White Citizens' Council ; Emmett Till ; Rosa Parks and boycotting the buses ; Little Rock and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 ; Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the stabbing of Martin Luther King, Jr. ; A Raisin in the Sun ; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and sit-ins ; Biloxi wade-in, Atlanta kneel-in, Jacksonville violence, University of Georgia riot ; Freedom rides ; Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics ; James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain -- The movement at high tide, 1963-1968. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" ; March on Washington and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing ; Live at the Apollo ; LeRoi Jones's Blues People and King's Nobel Peace Prize ; Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, and Freedom Summer ; War on Poverty, Economic Opportunity Act, Moynihan Report, Robert Weaver, Constance Baker Motley, Thurgood Marshall ; Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 ; Manchild in the Promised Land and The Autobiography of Malcolm X ; Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam ; James Meredith and Medgar Evers ; Civil rights protests and urban rioting in the north ; Selma, 1965 ; Sammy Younge, Vernon Dahmer, and the March Against Fear ; "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" ; Black Panthers, US, Kwanzaa ; Edward Brooke and Julian Bond ; Loving v. Virginia, 1967 ; Riots, Newark, election of black mayors ; Martin Luther King : Chicago, Vietnam, and assassination ; Civil Rights Act of 1968 ; The Orangeburg Massacre and the Kerner Report ; Poor People's Campaign and Resurrection City ; Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics -- Cultural integration, 1969-1979. Quincy Jones : American national treasure ; Arthur Ashe : a study in bravery ; Chicago Eight, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis ; 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act ; Growth of black political power ; Soul Train ; Busing in Boston ; Blacks in the military : Samuel Gravely, Janie Mines, Daniel James ; Alex Haley and Roots ; Black women activists of the 1970s ; The Morehouse School of Medicine and Louis Sullivan ; Birth of hip-hop ; The Bakke case and affirmative action -- Achievement, 1980-2008. African Americans in entertainment and the arts during the 1980s ; Martin Luther King Day ; Thriller and Purple Rain ; Jesse Jackson and Ronald Brown ; Fred Gorden and Barbara Harris ; Spike Lee ; Growing political power, 1989-1991 ; Riots in Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, Virginia Beach, and Los Angeles ; Clarence Thomas ; Air Jordan ; Photo essay : modern Olympians ; Advancement in the sciences ; Giant steps ; The achievements of Carl Lewis and Tiger Woods ; Pulitzer Prize stories : Toni Morrison and George Walker ; Tom Joyner ; Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March ; Proposition 209 and the Texaco discrimination suit ; Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and DNA ; Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo ; Stellar achiemvements ; Barack Obama in the U. S. Senate ; Hurricane Katrina ; The 2006 elections ; Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Subject Term:

African Americans -- History.

African Americans -- History -- Pictorial works.

Geographic Term:

United States -- Civilization -- African American influences.

Summary:

"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated, landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship, and including more than eight hundred images--ancient maps, art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop on to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single "Black Experience." Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination"--

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Summary

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama.

Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images--ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters-- Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single "black experience."

Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination.

Author Notes

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia. He received a degree in history from Yale University in 1973 and a Ph.D. from Clare College, which is part of the University of Cambridge in 1979. He is a leading scholar of African-American literature, history, and culture. He began working on the Black Periodical Literature Project, which uncovered lost literary works published in 1800s. He rediscovered what is believed to be the first novel published by an African-American in the United States. He republished the 1859 work by Harriet E. Wilson, entitled Our Nig, in 1983.

He has written numerous books including Colored People: A Memoir, A Chronology of African-American History, The Future of the Race, Black Literature and Literary Theory, and The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. In 1991, he became the head of the African-American studies department at Harvard University. He is now the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at the university.

He wrote and produced several documentaries including Wonders of the African World, America Beyond the Color Line, and African American Lives. He has also hosted PBS programs such as Wonders of the African World, Black in Latin America, and Finding Your Roots.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (6)

Publisher's Weekly Review

With nearly 900 illustrations (formal portraits, news photos, historic lithographs, broadsides, flyers, posters, newspaper clippings, advertisements) complemented by a succinct but informing text, Harvard professor Gates (Black in Latin America) provides a visual sojourn through African-American history, a generally upbeat march from Juan Garrido, accompanying Cortes in 1519, to Barack Obama taking the presidential oath in 2008. Gathered in this chronologically arranged compendium, with its focus on the accomplishments and moments of achievement in the African-American community, is a wealth of materials about the historical, political, social, literary, and scientific events influencing American social and political culture. Scant attention is paid to the oft-told tale of plantation slavery, although the devastations wrought upon the African-American community are not neglected: "the infamous Middle Passage," Fort Pillow massacre, the convict lease system, the Tulsa race riot, the Tuskegee syphilis study, the police attack on the Selma marchers, Hurricane Katrina. The familiar and famous are in Gates's encyclopedic reach, but so are the less known and nearly forgotten. (How hard it is today to imagine that a 1950 photograph of Billy Eckstein with "white female fans" could be "revolutionary.") "Although we cannot change the past," Gates observes in one entry, "we can change how we remember it." In this sumptuous volume, Gates assembles an affirming, illuminating, and needed tribute. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Four hundred years of public records and private collections went into the creation of this survey of African American history from well before the slave trade that would swell the black population of the New World to the election of the first black U.S. president. Gates begins with the little-known history of free black conquistadors, including Juan Garrido, who accompanied Ponce de Leon on his first expedition to Florida. Gates documents the famous, the obscure, and the long forgotten, from exploration to slavery to the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction to the world wars to the Great Migration and the Great Depression to the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age to the civil rights and black-power movements to the hip-hop generation. Maps, posters, manuscripts, documents, photographs, and postcards add to the appeal of this chronicle of the pressing issues and events of each generation and the incredible diversity covered by the appellation African American. A tour de force of African American history.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

SEVERAL years ago I gave a talk, or attempted to, at Fisk University on a book I'd written about the Billie Holiday song "Strange Fruit." The reaction was, to put it mildly, hostile. Who was I, a white man, to write on such a topic? I beat a hasty retreat that night, not even bothering to open the box of books I'd brought with me. The question, while offensive to me, is nonetheless interesting: why are white writers and historians so drawn to the history of black Americans? The answers are simple: The story is just so endlessly rich, and powerful, and poignant, and inspiring. Many topics, like "Strange Fruit" itself, aren't so neatly divided into "black" and "white." And of course, embedded in black history is the story of America itself. It is the story that Henry Louis Gates Jr. - a man whose credentials in this department, unlike mine, can never be challenged - attempts to encapsulate in this ambitious but frustrating book. Through dozens of profiles and other short essays, accompanied by abundant and beautifully reproduced prints, paintings, newspaper clippings and photographs, Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, tries to summarize the black experience in North America, from the arrival of the free black conquistador Juan Garrido with Ponce de León in 1513 to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Though there are inevitable gaps (there's one scant reference to Billie Holiday, for instance, and her name is misspelled), most of the major figures are here, from politics, religion, scholarship, entertainment, sports. It is an appropriately eclectic group, ranging from leaders of slave rebellions like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner to Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. Most are familiar, at least to semi-serious students of black history, but some are undeservedly obscure, like Cotton Mather's slave Onesimus, who taught Mather how to inoculate the Massachusetts Bay Colony against smallpox. There are the milestone events: the Middle Passage, the advent and abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the civil rights movement. Various black responses to oppression - emigration, accommodation, nonviolent protest, militarism - are also here, along with their principal exponents: Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael. So, too, are the various organizations, which, surprisingly to generations accustomed to seeing them march side by side, in fact had distinct origins and philosophies. Then there are the celebrated places: Harpers Ferry, Fort Pillow, Selma. And institutions like the Tuskegee Institute and Oberlin College, which single-handedly "admitted more black students before 1865 than all other American colleges and universities combined." (The first one didn't make it through Gates's Harvard until 1870.) Gates lays out the horrifying roster of humiliations, riots, poll taxes, chain gangs and court decisions that subjugated all blacks, freed and enslaved, North and South. After the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) - in which Chief Justice Roger Taney, sounding very much like today's "origin al ists," maintained that in decreeing blacks subhuman, the court was merely following the Constitution's "true intent and meaning when it was adopted" - even the indomitable Frederick Douglass considered emigrating to Haiti. Miraculously, a people given every excuse to be disloyal displayed extraordinary heroism in all American wars, dating back to 1776. There are periodic surprises in the book, particularly at the outset, when the subject matter is less familiar: "only" 450,000 of the 12.5 million slaves brought to the New World came to the United States; New York's blacks were in effect barred from Lincoln's funeral march; a black man named Matthew Henson may have beaten Adm. Robert Peary to the North Pole (that is, if either of them ever got there), at least by a few steps; and, fearing the Scottsboro Boys really were rapists, the N.A.A.C.P. shied away from defending them. But for every edifying surprise, there are many frustrations. Most fundamentally, this book is not what it claims to be. Rather than a nuanced, textured account of what it has meant to be black in America, "Life Upon These Shores" is a hit parade of black accomplishment and exceptionalism - a chronicle of what Du Bois called (I guess it sounded all right at the time), and Gates later dredges up (jokingly, but nonetheless tastelessly, to describe some contemporary black corporate chieftains), the "talented tenth." On every other page is a black first: first slave narrative published in North America; first published poem and novel by an African-American; first black newspaper; first black medical school graduate, college professor, diplomat, elected official, woman lawyer, West Point graduate, licensed woman pilot, author to write a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It reads a bit like one of those page-a-day historical calendars. Strictly as a matter of mathematics, black history in this country consists primarily of slavery: what Lincoln called "the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil" still far exceeds the time blacks have actually been free. Yet there's almost nothing here about how these slaves lived: whom and how they married, tinder what circumstances their families were broken up, how and what they ate, whom and how they worshiped, what they sang and how they spoke. This same shortcoming - the failure to describe the lives led by ordinary people - marks, and mars, the entire book. The very thing for which Gates extols the writers Amiri Baraka and Claude Brown - capturing black consciousness and life on the streets - he supplies precious little of himself. There are more problems. Gates's insistence on making all entries bite-size gives excessive weight to some people and seriously shortchanges others. Towering figures like Douglass and Du Bois simply demand much more attention than they're given. So, too, do crucial topics like lynching, which afflicted black Americans for decades. I, for one, would happily have forgone some details about Halle Berry, "Soul Train" and Prince to make room for it. In the Wikipedia era, entries in books like this must be more vivid and insightful than some of Gates's more pedestrian moments. Descriptions of epochal events, like Martin Luther King's magnificent final speech in Memphis, are rendered lifelessly. Isn't something like Bill Russell's sometimes frosty relations with white fans and the white press more interesting than meaningless stats about his presence on the 25th- and 35th-anniversary N.B.A. all-time teams? (In a book of this kind, the underrepresentation of whites is entirely defensible. But can one really write about King's assassination without at least identifying the man who killed him, and why? Or about John Brown's raid without adequately describing John Brown?) The book is often repetitious. There are also structural problems; for instance, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" comes before Malcolm X himself. Sometimes it's almost embarrassingly contradictory, suggesting separate authors or an AWOL editor or both. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 "paid dividends almost immediately," one section concludes. "Passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 did little, at first, to advance the struggle for civil rights," the very next section begins. There are mistakes: when Jack Johnson became heavyweight champion; which home run constituted Henry Aaron's record breaker. Claude Barnett founded the Associated, not the American, Negro Press; that Joe Louis was exponentially more popular than Jesse Owens in the 1930s is so obvious that appending a "perhaps" is simply wrong. Gates is prone to exaggeration, even cheerleading. Could Gordon Parks - or any photographer, white or black - really have "photographed virtually everyone of significance" in his career? Do you think Condoleezza Rice "steadfastly and expertly" guided the country through its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? At one point, Gates unbecomingly peddles two of his own PBS series. And he soft-pedals, too: True, Ralph Ellison died before completing his second novel. But shouldn't we be told that Ellison had had 42 years in which to write it? Gates's problem is partly ambition, or chutzpah. Far better it would have been to have gotten experts to paint small portions of this vast canvas than to have slathered it all on oneself. But the real flaw is in his approach. The blacks in "Life Upon These Shores" are all heroes and victims, with no one more variegated in between. Missing are not just ordinary folks but villains (if you don't count the muchmaligned Booker T. Washington, an easy target of Gates's frequent gibes). While he celebrates black athletes aplenty, for instance, Gates writes nothing about O. J. Simpson, whose trial also surely said something profound about "life upon these shores." The story Gates has valiantly attempted to chronicle - and the book is a useful primer for neophytes - is endlessly fascinating and thrilling. But that one of our most eminent black scholars feels compelled to give us something so often superficial and boosterish is sad as well. It reminds us, yet again, that we still haven't come as far as we must. Senators Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels flank Frederick Douglass in a chromolithograph from 1881. After the Dred Scott case, even Frederick Douglass considered emigrating to Haiti. David Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock."

Choice Review

Gates directs the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. This volume is an excellent example of Gates's ability to maintain high standards of scholarship while making a broad, dense subject accessible to a modern audience. This incredibly comprehensive history begins African life in America in 1513 with a free black conquistador who accompanied Ponce de Leon, and concludes with Barack Obama's presidential election in 2008. Amazingly, Gates manages to capture well-known figures and events as well as the not so well known. And he covers the diverse spectrum of black American politics, art, literature, religion, sports, and popular culture. The book is richly illustrated with maps, woodcuts, line drawings, cartoons, color photographs, and daguerreotypes; there is some type of picture on each page. Much of the history presented here is "familiar in the academy"; however, it will be new to many general readers, and as Gates writes in his introduction, he intends this book to be "a general history for a general audience." A remarkable accomplishment that should endure through many editions. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. D. W. Bilal Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis

Kirkus Review

Black in Latin America, 2011, etc.) arranges his history chronologically, with each chapter successively packed with more information, reflecting the ever-increasing impact of African-Americans on the nation. From the conquistadors and the origins of slavery in the Americas, through the Revolutionary period, the rise of abolitionism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the Great Migration, both World Wars and the 20th century's civil-rights movement, up to President Obama's election, the supremely qualified Gates guides us through centuries of history with encyclopedia-style, mini-essays on a vast array of topics. No significant figure in African-American history goes untreated, and many names are rescued from neglect. Gates takes the "looking" part of his subtitle seriously. The stunning illustrations--photos, paintings, engravings, posters, broadsides, drawings, maps, advertisements, cartoons and film stills--perfectly supplement a text in which individual entries are necessarily abbreviated to permit single-volume coverage of so vast a topic. More than 800 images, many unforgettable, instantly convey, for example, the charm of Billy Eckstine, the fierce dignity of Frederick Douglass, the grace of Arthur Ashe, the intensity of Richard Wright and the anguish of Martin Luther King Jr. They powerfully capture the brutality of a slave coffle, the horror of lynching, the heedless cruelty of the sambo caricature and the absurdity of Jim Crow prohibitions. A striking, comprehensive guide to the breadth and depth of African-American history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

The credentials of author Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. Challenging the notion of a single "Black Experience," Gates contextualizes his narrative with more than 800 images and doesn't duck controversy. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

INTRODUCTION Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored without wages; they made cotton king . . .--and yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail . . . because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963 In Life Upon These Shores , I set out to picture African American history, to find a new way of looking at its full sweep. I imagined a book with an abundance of images of the great and small events and of the signifi cant individuals who shaped the heritage of the African American people and the history of our nation. Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History draws upon a treasury of illustrations at once to visualize and to write the history of black people in America, which begins as early as 1513, when the free black conquistador Juan Garrido accompanied Ponce de León on his first expedition to Florida. So the book ranges from the exploration of the New World and the long ordeal of slavery through Emancipation and the Civil War; from the era of Reconstruction through Jim Crow and World War I; from the Great Migration of 1910 to 1930--including the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age-- through the Great Depression and World War II; from the civil rights movement and its aftermath, and the Black Power insurgence, on to the age of hip-hop and the rise of the Joshua Generation, leading to the election of the first African American president of the United States. Life Upon These Shores illustrates the richness of this history through ancient maps, manuscripts and documents, portraits, postcards, posters, sheet music, cartoons, drawings and photographs, and even film stills. We have combed through more than four hundred years of public records and private collections for the names, stories, and images of not only well-known African Americans but also others who have been consigned to oblivion even as they too were instrumental in shaping African American history day to day. To be sure, here are the transcendent personalities: among many, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Madam C. J. Walker, Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, George Schulyer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali, Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, John Lewis, James Meredith, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, James Brown, Amiri Baraka, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson and Prince, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama. Their vaunted contributions to politics, sports, literature, the arts, religion, and education have indelibly colored the canvas of American culture and society. But this book also aims in part to restore to the historical record the names and achievements of significant men and women long forgotten: among them Onesimus, the slave who taught Cotton Mather to inoculate the Massachusetts colony against smallpox; the pre--Civil War, wildly popular black ventriloquist and magician Richard Potter; Stagecoach Mary, a post-- Civil War driver for Wells Fargo; and the famous cowboy Deadwood Dick. As I have studied the remarkable visual depictions collected in Life Upon These Shores, I have been struck by the sheer diversity of African American expression throughout our nation's history-- how there has never been only one way to be black, religiously, politically, socially, artistically, professionally, sexually, or stylistically. I have tried to showcase the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives defi ning black culture and society from slavery to freedom, from the plantation to the White House. Although, for example, debates between such central figures as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, or Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., are familiar in the academy, they remain largely unknown to the general public, as do controversies involving their lesser-known peers; the latter too have a place at the table. These and all the other images and stories in this book help us to understand the complexity of the African American people, the rich and honest diversity of opinion that has always characterized the black experience in America. Life Upon These Shores seeks not only to elucidate the pressing issues faced by each generation of African Americans but also to evoke the limitless variety of African American life: for instance, the experience of slavery in the North as opposed to slavery on a Southern plantation or in the West; the experience of being a freedperson as opposed to a slave; the experience of being a sharecropper in the South in the early twentieth century as opposed to a dockworker in Oakland or an autoworker in Detroit; the experience of being a black woman as opposed to a black man. Here are images of African Americans from different African ethnic groups dragged into slavery, forced to imagine new identities upon these shores; images of free blacks alongside their enslaved brethren in the South, forming their own religious, social, and cultural institutions in the North; images documenting the myriad ways in which some resisted slavery and segregation even as others sought accommodation, all the while forging family ties and communal bonds "behind the veil," as W. E. B. Du Bois put it. The illustrations also offer a glimpse at how global affairs infl uenced African American history. So it was that the Haitian Revolution (1791--1804) sparked demands for the abolition of slavery and for equal rights up through the Civil War, while inspiring slave rebellions in America. A century and a half or so later, African movements for independence from colonialism informed the American civil rights movement, which in turn was to have a profound infl uence on the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. A collective visual history of persons of African descent in America since their arrival in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Life Upon These Shores-- by examining defi ning issues, controversies and debates, and the achievements of people who shaped the history day to day for more than four hundred years--reveals, in all its human glory, the generally unacknowledged multifaceted nature of the black experience in these United States. This is a general history for a general audience and relies on an enormous body of scholarly literature. The book stands on the shoulders of true giants. To retain its appeal, I have limited intrusive scholarly apparatus and identified sources only for direct quotes or for information not readily accessible. For those seeking verification of facts or additional information, one should consult the extended bibliography, which lists all of the major works used in this study. Henry Louis Gates , Jr. Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts August 31, 2010 Excerpted from Life upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 by Henry Louis Gates All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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