Rough Crossing: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution
By Simon Schama
Ecco (2006)
A prolific and popular historian, Simon Schama has crafted a moving — though often depressing — story of slavery, abolition and war in the Age of Revolution. Many slaves in the North American Colonies seized upon notions of freedom and allied themselves with the British against the Americans during the War for Independence. Ultimately, though, few found the freedom they sought, despite the calls of abolitionists and their own determined efforts to carve out new lives in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863
By Leslie M. Harris
University of Chicago Press (2002)
Stories of Freedom in Black New York
By Shane White
Harvard University Press (2002)
Contrary to popular belief, the institution of chattel slavery was hardly confined to the American South. Two award-winning studies vividly re-create the world that black New Yorkers created prior to the Civil War. Leslie M. Harris explores in rich detail the nature of slavery in New York City, at one time home to the most slaves outside of Charleston, S.C., and the contours of black politics and abolitionism. Shane White’s short but creative book about “slavery and its lingering death” and the struggle over the “boundaries of freedom” listens closely to black New Yorkers’ stories, evocatively bringing them to life for contemporary readers.
Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration
By James R. Grossman
University of Chicago Press (1989)
The World War I era witnessed a migration of unprecedented size, bringing as many as half a million southern blacks to the urban North. Chicago was the destination of tens of thousands, who came in search of a “land of hope” free of the racial oppression they endured in the South. In his classic study, James Grossman poignantly explains how and why migrants made Chicago their home and how the “land of hope” often fell short of their expectations.
Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom From the 1790s Through the Civil War
By Melvin Patrick Ely
Knopf (2004)
Were free blacks in the slave South only slaves without masters, as historians once argued? Melvin Ely’s Bancroft Prize-winning study of one free black community in Virginia’s Prince Edward County definitively answers no. Meticulously tracing the lives of the freed slaves of Richard Randolph, cousin of Thomas Jefferson, Ely reveals a complicated world marked by slavery’s inhumanity, widespread discrimination and second-class citizenship on the one hand, and free black achievement and white flexibility on the other. Ely provides readers with an unromantic yet deeply moving account that is a model of balanced historical research.
Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War
Edited by Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland
New Press (1995 paper)
Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War
By Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland
Cambridge University Press (1992)
For the past three decades, historians engaged in the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland have examined countless primary documents housed at the National Archives to produce a series of first-rate documentary histories that give voice to slaves, former slaves, Union soldiers and plantation owners during the upheaval of the Civil War and its aftermath. An excellent compilation of some of the best and most powerful of these documents, “Free at Last” is an accessible volume that students and general readers will appreciate. In a related volume, “Slaves No More,” project participants draw upon their documentary treasure trove to interpret the dramatic transition from slavery to freedom in the crucible of war, with their focus firmly set on the actions and aspirations of southern blacks.
The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics
By James Oakes
Norton (2007)
A sophisticated and skilled storyteller, historian James Oakes explores the tensions between pragmatism and radicalism as he traces the political journeys and interactions of white politician Abraham Lincoln and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as they pursued, along different paths, the abolition of slavery.
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race
By David Levering Lewis
Owl (1994 paper)
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963
By David Levering Lewis
Holt (2000)
One of the towering figures in African-American political and intellectual life, W.E.B. Du Bois shaped the character of black protest and history over the course of a long and often controversial life of activism, journalism and scholarship. David Levering Lewis’ engaging, two-volume biography (the first volume won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize) offers the definitive portrait of this civil rights radical.
Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality
By Richard Slotkin
Holt (2005)
New York City’s white European immigrants and its black “Harlem Hell Fighters” are the subject of Richard Slotkin’s engrossing cultural history of American soldiers at home and abroad during World War I. Slotkin is as adept at addressing questions of American identity and definitions of citizenship as he is in portraying the humanity of black and white soldiers in the American Expeditionary Force and the horrors of war on the French front.
Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945
By Beth Tompkins Bates
University of North Carolina Press (2000)
How did the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters emerge as the premier black union in the U.S. during the Depression of the 1930s? Focusing on Chicago, a union stronghold, Beth Tompkins Bates skillfully re-creates the pioneering efforts of Pullman porters to organize and win recognition from Pullman Co. In doing so they spread the trade-union gospel in the black communities, achieved a level of dignity and respect in the workplace and forged a new kind of civil rights unionism.
Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960
By Arnold R. Hirsch
University of Chicago Press (1998 paper)
Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side
By Amanda I. Seligman
University of Chicago Press (2005)
Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century
By Andrew Wiese
University of Chicago Press (2004)
For all of the progress made by advocates of civil rights, residential segregation by race remains an enduring problem. Arnold Hirsch’s groundbreaking book uncovers the racial politics behind the initial construction of segregated high-rise public housing in Chicago, while Amanda Seligman examines racial conflict, black migration, white flight and racial succession on Chicago’s West Side after World War II. In his original study, Andrew Wiese moves beyond the framework of urban race relations to recount the history and meaning of the movement of African-Americans to the suburbs, where more than one-third of the nation’s black population lived by 2000.
Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South
By Glenn Feldman
University of Alabama Press (2004)
Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950
Edited by Charles M. Payne and Adam Green
New York University Press (2003)
In the popular mind, the “Eyes on the Prize” documentary films established the chronological origins of modern civil rights in the mid-1950s. For years, however, historians have been insisting that the movement hardly began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. These two collections of essays effectively push back the chronological boundaries to reveal the history of numerous activists, organizations and movements before the advent of the modern movement. Glenn Feldman’s volume focuses on the “critically important 1940s and early 1950s,” while Charles Payne and Adam Green’s collection probes “the depth of African Americans’ activist initiative” into the 19th Century.
Ralph Ellison: A Biography
By Arnold Rampersad
Knopf (2007)
Literary historian Arnold Rampersad methodically examines the fascinating private and public life of writer Ralph Ellison, whose sole novel, “Invisible Man,” catapulted its author into enduring prominence. Rampersad’s respectful but critical account of this enigmatic radical-turned-conservative, his complex relationship with other authors, his inability to produce a second novel and his distance from black politics and civil rights is absorbing.
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
By David Garrow
HarperPerennial Modern Classics (2004 paper)
The subject of numerous books and articles, Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most written about civil rights leaders in America. This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography is an enduring classic that offers a comprehensive, clearheaded and nuanced portrait of King and the movement he lead.
Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Laws That Changed America
By Nick Kotz
Mariner (2005)
The recent dust-up between Democratic presidential contenders over the respective roles of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. should send all political candidates, columnists and pundits to journalist Nick Kotz’s riveting “Judgment Days.” This account, which treats Johnson and King as “unlikely partners” whose “synergy” produced the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is a forceful reminder of the interconnectedness of social movements and public officials.
Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth Century America
Edited by Patrick B. Miller and David K. Wiggins
Routledge (2003)
The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport
Edited by David K. Wiggins and Patrick B. Miller
University of Illinois Press (2003)
These two collections — the first of previously published articles, the second of primary documents — offer a wide range of historical and contemporary perspectives on individual black athletes, the images and realities of African-Americans in specific sports (boxing, baseball, track and field, basketball, etc.), and race and civil rights on and off the playing field.
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Eric Arnesen is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a frequent contributor to the Books section.
