Everybody Say Freedom: Everything You Need to Know About African-American History - Softcover

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Africana Studies at Cornell University, and also tenured at Yale, Duke, and Harvard, where he was appointed W.E.B. DuBois professor of humanities in 1991. Professor Gates is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Wonders of the African World, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Loose Cannons: Notes on the Culture Wars, and Colored People: A Memoir. With Cornel West, he co-wrote The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country and The Future of the Race. He is also the editor of the critically-acclaimed edition of Our Nig, an annotated reprint of Harriet E. Wilson’s 1859 novel, The Slave’s Narrative (with the late Charles T. Davis), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, Six Women’s Slave Narratives, and In the House of Oshugbo: Critical Essays on Wole Soyinka. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize.

Each of these volumes uses a question-and-answer format to provide a ready-reference primer on African American history. Focusing on questions of elemental fact and of roles and interpretive perspectives, each defines basic terms, sketches dominant trends, and identifies prominent persons, particularly firsts in their field. Both books offer easily accessed, chronologically organized surveys aimed at drawing readers into the epic of the African American past, and both succeed admirably. In his ten-chapter work, Jackson (Stanford, history) provides longer, essay-like answers averaging about 900-1000 words but running as long as 1500, with multiple references after each entry. In their five chapters, Newman (program officer, Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois Inst.) and Sawyer (history and culture, California State Univ., San Marcos) tend toward shorter answers averaging 300-500 words, with one or two recommended readings. Each book fills the gap between encyclopedia and textbook, and both are recommended for school and public library collections on U.S. and African American history.?Thomas Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
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