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.
About Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is editor in chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center and of the daily online magazine The Root. He has received more than forty honorary degrees from institutions the world over.
The African-American Experience
The New York Times December 9, 2011 (Excerpt)
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. [Read the full article...]
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One thing has perplexed me for years. In the U.S., why does “one drop”
of African blood make you black, but “one drop” of Irish blood doesn’t
make you Irish?
THE BLEEDING HILLS
Hello,
One thing has perplexed me for years. In the U.S., why does “one drop”
of African blood make you black, but “one drop” of Irish blood doesn’t
make you Irish?
Robert