Children of fire : a history of African Americans

The Resource Children of fire : a history of African Americans

Label

Children of fire : a history of African Americans

Title remainder

a history of African Americans

Statement of responsibility

Thomas C. Holt

Title variation

History of African Americans

Language

eng

Summary

Synopsis: Ordinary people don't experience history as it is taught by historians. They live across the convenient chronological divides we impose on the past. The same people who lived through the Civil War and the eradication of slavery also dealt with the hardships of Reconstruction, so why do we almost always treat them separately? In this groundbreaking new book, renowned historian Thomas C. Holt challenges this form to tell the story of generations of African Americans through the lived experience of the subjects themselves, with all of the nuances, ironies, contradictions, and complexities one might expect. Building on seminal books like John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom and many others, Holt captures the entire African American experience from the moment the first twenty African slaves were sold at Jamestown in 1619. Each chapter focuses on a generation of individuals who shaped the course of American history, hoping for a better life for their children but often confronting the ebb and flow of their civil rights and status within society. Many familiar faces grace these pages - Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama - but also some overlooked ones. Figures like Anthony Johnson, a slave who bought his freedom in late seventeenth century Virginia and built a sizable plantation, only to have it stolen away from his children by an increasingly racist court system. Or Frank Moore, a WWI veteran and sharecropper who sued his landlord for unfair practices, but found himself charged with murder after fighting off an angry white posse. Taken together, their stories tell how African Americans fashioned a culture and identity amid the turmoil of four centuries of American history

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

973/.0496073

Illustrations

illustrations
maps

Index

index present

LC call number

E185

LC item number

.H57 2010

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Context

Context of Children of fire : a history of African Americans

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Context

Work of