About African American Lives
Henry Louis Gates, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Hardback,
Mar 2004
ISBN13: 9780195160246ISBN10: 019516024X
More than 600 biographies of noteworthy African Americans, ranging from Esteban, the first known African in North America, right up to the continuing careers of Venus and Serena Williams.
"These extraordinary lives capture the breadth and diversity of African American experiences and achievements. Included are men and women who lived at the time of the American Revolution as well as men and women who live in twenty-first century America. Many are familiar heroes and public leaders, while others are obscure, their names long forgotten. Like the communities they passed through, the subjects of African American Lives embody multi-dimensional personalities, motivations, and social contexts. Their stories tell of the past and the present but speak most of all to the role of the individual in history."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
From tragedy to triumph,
African American Lives illuminates the full range of African American history by collecting hundreds of poignant biographies. Drawing on the immediacy of individual experience, each uniquely stirring account reaffirms the significance of a familiar hero or public figure or restores the luster to a life long forgotten. Inspiring, enchanting, and provocative,
African American Lives is peerless in its ambition.
From Esteban, the earliest known African to set foot in North America in 1528, right up to the continuing careers of Venus and Serena Williams, these stories of the renowned and the unsung give us a new view of American history. Selected from over five thousand entries in the forthcoming eight-volume
African American National Biography, the subjects include slaves and abolitionists, writers, politicians, and business people, musicians and dancers, artist and athletes, victims of injustice and the lawyers, journalists, and civil rights leaders who gave them a voice. Their experiences and accomplishments combine to expose the powerful and complex role of race in America's past and present.
African American Lives leads us into a new era of African American biographical scholarship. The general editors and the editorial staff at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, in collaboration with Oxford University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies, and with contributions from over four hundred scholars and experts in many fields, have collected in this single volume the lives of many of the most important and most interesting names in African American history.
