Synopses & Reviews
More than any other text, The African-American Odyssey illuminates the central place of African Americans in U.S. history – not only telling the story of what it has meant to be black in America, but also how African-American history is inseparably weaved into the greater context of American history and vice versa.
This updated edition brings the story up to 2008 and the historic election of the first African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama.
Told through a clear, direct, and flowing narrative by leading scholars in the field, The African-American Odyssey draws on recent research to present black history within broad social, cultural, and political frameworks. From Africa to the Twenty-First Century, this book follows their long, turbulent journey, including the rich culture that African Americans have nurtured throughout their history and the many-faceted quest for freedom in which African Americans have sought to counter oppression and racism. This text also recognizes the diversity within the African-American sphere – providing coverage of all class and of women and balancing the lives of ordinary men and women with the accounts and actions of black leaders and individuals.
About the Author
Darlene Clark Hine
Darlene Clark Hine is Board of Trustees Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past President of the Organization of American Historians and of the Southern Historical Association. Hine received her BA at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and her MA and Ph.D. from Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. Hine has taught at South Carolina State University and at Purdue University. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She is the author and/or co-editor of fifteen books, most recently The Harvard Guide to African American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) coedited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Leon Litwack. She coedited a two volume set with Earnestine Jenkins, A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Men’s History and Masculinity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 2001); and with Jacqueline McLeod, Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000pk). With Kathleen Thompson she wrote A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), and edited with Barry Gaspar, More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). She won the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association for the reference volumes coedited with Elsa Barkley Brown and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1993). She is the author of Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Her forthcoming book is entitled The Black Professional Class: Physicians, Nurses, Lawyers, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890–1955.
William C. Hine
William C. Hine received his undergraduate education at Bowling Green State University, his master’s degree at the University of Wyoming, and his Ph.D. at Kent State University. He is a professor of history at South Carolina State University. He has had articles published in several journals, including Agricultural History, Labor History, and the Journal of Southern History. He is currently writing a history of South Carolina State University.
Stanley Harrold
Stanley Harrold, Professor of History at South Carolina State University, received his bachelor’s degree from Allegheny College and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Kent State University. He is coeditor of Southern Dissent, a book series published by the University Press of Florida. He received during the 1990s two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships to pursue research dealing with the antislavery movement. In 2005 he received a Faculty Research Award from the NEH in support of his current research on physical conflict along America’s North-South sectional border from the 1780s to the Civil War. His books include: Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), The Abolitionists and the South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (co-edited with John R. McKivigan; Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), American Abolitionists (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2001), Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 18280-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univeristy Press, 2003), The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), and Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Reader (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2007). He has published articles in Civil War History, Journal of Southern History, Radical History Review, and Journal of the Early Republic.
Table of Contents
12 The Meaning of Freedom: The Promise of Reconstruction, 1865–1868 258
13 The Meaning of Freedom: The Failure of Reconstruction, 284
PART IV
Searching for Safe Spaces 306
14 White Supremacy Triumphant: African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century 308
15 Black Southerners Challenge White Supremacy 334
16 Conciliation, Agitation, and Migration: African Americans in the Early Twentieth Century 364
17 African Americans and the 1920s 400
PARTV
The Great Depression and World War II 426
18 The Great Depression and The New Deal 428
19 Black Culture and Society in the 1930s and 1940s 454
20 The World War II Era and Seeds of a Revolution 480
PART VI
The Black Revolution 510
21 The Freedom Movement, 1954—1965 512
22 The Struggle Continues, 1965—1980 542
23 Black Politics, White Backlash, 1980 to Present 576
24 African Americans in the New Millenium
Epilogue: “A Nation Within a Nation” 608