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To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans
Written by the most prominent of the new generation of historians, this superb volume offers the most up-to-date and authoritative account available of African-American history, ranging from the first Africans brought as slaves into the Americas, to today's black filmmakers and politicians.
Here is a panoramic view of African American life, rich in gripping first-person accounts and short character sketches that invite readers to relive history as African Americans experienced it. We begin in Africa, with the growth of the slave trade, and follow the forced migration of what is estimated to be between ten and twenty million people, witnessing the terrible human cost of slavery in the colonies of England and Spain. We read of the Haitian Revolution, which ended victoriously in 1804 with the birth of the first independent black nation in the New World, and of slave rebellions and resistance in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. There are vivid accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the backlash of notorious "Jim Crow" laws and mob lynchings, and the founding of key black educational institutions. The contributors also trace the migration of blacks to the major cities, the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the hardships of the Great
Depression and the service of African Americans in World War II, the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and '60s, and the emergence of today's black middle class.
From Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Louis Farrakhan, To Make Our World Anew is an unforgettable portrait of a people.
Here is a panoramic view of African American life, rich in gripping first-person accounts and short character sketches that invite readers to relive history as African Americans experienced it. We begin in Africa, with the growth of the slave trade, and follow the forced migration of what is estimated to be between ten and twenty million people, witnessing the terrible human cost of slavery in the colonies of England and Spain. We read of the Haitian Revolution, which ended victoriously in 1804 with the birth of the first independent black nation in the New World, and of slave rebellions and resistance in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. There are vivid accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the backlash of notorious "Jim Crow" laws and mob lynchings, and the founding of key black educational institutions. The contributors also trace the migration of blacks to the major cities, the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the hardships of the Great
Depression and the service of African Americans in World War II, the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and '60s, and the emergence of today's black middle class.
From Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Louis Farrakhan, To Make Our World Anew is an unforgettable portrait of a people.
688 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
19 people are currently reading
347 people want to read
About the author
Robin D.G. Kelley
90 books421 followersRobin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 13, 2023
“To make our world anew” is an excellent survey of African American history. This book is a good choice for readers with a general knowledge of American history who are seeking to gain a deeper understanding of that multi-faceted history, specifically in this case with respect to the African American experience within it. The structure of the book also makes it a useful reference work for those looking to enhance or refresh their knowledge about particular time periods or aspects of African American history.
The book consists of 10 chapters, each written by a different historian (or three historians in one instance), advancing chronologically through periods of American history from 1502 to the late 1990s, just before the book’s publication in 2000. There is also an introductory preface by the compilation’s editors, Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, that provides an excellent, brief (10 page) overview of African American history and the book’s content. The slavery, violence, oppression, discrimination, and other tragedies inflicted on African Americans throughout American history are represented in these chapters, but the volume’s emphasis actually lies elsewhere. The principal distinguishing feature of this book is that its focus is less on the victimization of Black Americans (though that surely registers) and more on their actions as agents of resistance and rebellion, strategizing for freedom and civil rights, community and institution building, creating literary and other cultural works, and pursuing other forms of empowerment in efforts to shape their own lives as Americans in the face of racial oppression. As the chapters trace the tectonic changes in the historical contexts faced by African Americans over time—as abducted captives taken to America and sold as property, as enslaved people weighing their odds of freedom during the American Revolution, as emancipated freedpeople after the Civil War, as a population subjected to Jim Crow laws, as migrants moving from southern farms to northern cities, and so on—the authors emphasize the resilience and resourcefulness of Black Americans in, as the title indicates, making their world anew.
Although the volume as a whole is organized chronologically, each individual chapter does not follow a strictly chronological narrative flow. Rather, the authors arrange their chapters into relevant subject-oriented sections, such as work/labor, education, or race-based laws. This is an effective approach for harnessing the sprawling content, but can read a bit dry at points. The overall tone of the book is rather dispassionate with a straightforward text that avoids polemic. Yet the content is frequently humanized and enlivened with the inclusion of significant individuals throughout; these range from the very well known (such as Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King, Jr.) to those perhaps less familiar (such as Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, or Richard L. Davis, a founder of the United Mine Workers). Along these lines, a notable strength of the book is its concise descriptions of the various ideological stances taken by figures such as Martin Delany, Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X, among many others, in response to white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans. The authors are also attentive to differences in the lived experience between men and women, between agricultural and industrial settings, between regions of the country, between points of interracial tensions and cooperation, and other nuances.
As with many survey works such as this with something of a textbook feel that are a synthesis of a broad range of underlying historical literature, the chapters do not include endnotes. Although that is a bit disappointing for a work of history, perhaps more useful in this case than granular endnotes is the appendix of “further reading.” Much more than the typical raw alphabetical bibliography found in many works, this extensive reading list is segmented by the book’s chapters and by subject matter within each chapter, making it an invaluable guide for drilling down selectively on content of interest to the reader. Given that this book was published in 2000, the list does not include the important works published since then, but that absence does not detract from the value of the works included.
The book consists of 10 chapters, each written by a different historian (or three historians in one instance), advancing chronologically through periods of American history from 1502 to the late 1990s, just before the book’s publication in 2000. There is also an introductory preface by the compilation’s editors, Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, that provides an excellent, brief (10 page) overview of African American history and the book’s content. The slavery, violence, oppression, discrimination, and other tragedies inflicted on African Americans throughout American history are represented in these chapters, but the volume’s emphasis actually lies elsewhere. The principal distinguishing feature of this book is that its focus is less on the victimization of Black Americans (though that surely registers) and more on their actions as agents of resistance and rebellion, strategizing for freedom and civil rights, community and institution building, creating literary and other cultural works, and pursuing other forms of empowerment in efforts to shape their own lives as Americans in the face of racial oppression. As the chapters trace the tectonic changes in the historical contexts faced by African Americans over time—as abducted captives taken to America and sold as property, as enslaved people weighing their odds of freedom during the American Revolution, as emancipated freedpeople after the Civil War, as a population subjected to Jim Crow laws, as migrants moving from southern farms to northern cities, and so on—the authors emphasize the resilience and resourcefulness of Black Americans in, as the title indicates, making their world anew.
Although the volume as a whole is organized chronologically, each individual chapter does not follow a strictly chronological narrative flow. Rather, the authors arrange their chapters into relevant subject-oriented sections, such as work/labor, education, or race-based laws. This is an effective approach for harnessing the sprawling content, but can read a bit dry at points. The overall tone of the book is rather dispassionate with a straightforward text that avoids polemic. Yet the content is frequently humanized and enlivened with the inclusion of significant individuals throughout; these range from the very well known (such as Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King, Jr.) to those perhaps less familiar (such as Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, or Richard L. Davis, a founder of the United Mine Workers). Along these lines, a notable strength of the book is its concise descriptions of the various ideological stances taken by figures such as Martin Delany, Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X, among many others, in response to white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans. The authors are also attentive to differences in the lived experience between men and women, between agricultural and industrial settings, between regions of the country, between points of interracial tensions and cooperation, and other nuances.
As with many survey works such as this with something of a textbook feel that are a synthesis of a broad range of underlying historical literature, the chapters do not include endnotes. Although that is a bit disappointing for a work of history, perhaps more useful in this case than granular endnotes is the appendix of “further reading.” Much more than the typical raw alphabetical bibliography found in many works, this extensive reading list is segmented by the book’s chapters and by subject matter within each chapter, making it an invaluable guide for drilling down selectively on content of interest to the reader. Given that this book was published in 2000, the list does not include the important works published since then, but that absence does not detract from the value of the works included.
March 12, 2021
This book suffers from a problem that is common to many books of its kind, in that the authors of this book assume that the only readers of a book by, for, and about African Americans are in fact other African Americans or, at the least, those who are sympathetic to identity politics relating to such a population. This is not the case with me, and as might be imagined, this book was less enjoyable the more closely the material dealt with contemporary identity politics or other types of politics and generally better when it dealt with the past. It is hard to judge a book like this overall because its chapters are written by a variety of different writers, not all of whom are equally open about having a misguided and mistaken and defective Marxist worldview, and some of whom are very obvious about it, to the detriment of historical accuracy or enjoyability in reading. As is often the case when I read analogous books relating to women, there is a lot that is lost when people believe they are writing for a narrow and sympathetic audience when instead they are writing to a much larger and not necessarily sympathetic audience, and that makes this book less effective than it could have been at communicating the historical experience of African Americans in such a way that it could communicate effectively with an outside audience.
This book is a sizable one at about 600 pages of material, not including its appendices and other supplementary material. This material is then divided into ten somewhat large chapters written by a variety of historians from some varying perspectives. The book begins with a preface, after which there is a discussion of the first passage of blacks from Africa to North America from 1502-1619, in the period before English settlement, where the patterns of the Atlantic slave trade (the author largely neglects the Islamic slave trade, as is customary in these discussions) took place (1). After this there is a chapter on the creation of the African American identity within the colonies between 1619 and 1776, which includes the change of laws and the birth of literary African Americans capable of telling their own stories (2). This is followed by a chapter that discusses blacks as revolutionary citizens in the early period after independence to 1804 (3). After this comes another essay that discusses the rising and tensions concerning blacks and their state in society in antebellum American society (4). The next chapter after this discusses the freedom of blacks from slavery as well as the period of Reconstruction that followed to 1880 (5). At this point the book takes a turn that focuses on things that are increasingly relevant to contemporary politics, with a look at the nadir of relations between 1880 and 1900 (6) as well as an art essay on what Africa means to the author. This is followed by a look at the rising opportunities to some blacks in the first 29 years of the 20th century (7) as well as a look at the raw deal and new deal for blacks to the end of World War II (8). The book then ends with a chapter expressing the changes that black people brought to their world through political action (9), the struggles since 1970 (10), as well as a chronology, suggestion for further reading, info on the book's contributors, and an index.
By and large, this book suffers from a great many serious tensions between the desire of many of the authors of this book to celebrate the worthwhile achievements of black cultural figures, creative types, and entrepreneurs as well as the often snobbish leftist hostility to matters of business and focus on political power and a narrow socialist political ideology. This is related to other tensions that the authors seem not to be fully aware about that hinder the reader's enjoyment of this work. For one, many of the authors wish to condemn the widespread belief among many whites that blacks and whites cannot live at peace in an egalitarian multiracial society, a belief that has been extant from at least late colonial times to the present day. Yet other writers undercut this by supporting violent anti-white and anti-capitalist and indeed anti-democratic revolutionary politics that indicate that such people cannot live peacefully in a genuinely American society, and that there is at least a sizable and culturally relevant activist class that is worthy of considerable hostility from mainstream America on grounds of self-preservation alone. The authors seem unwilling to understand and reflect upon what it is that brings elevation to their people at all, and a sense of frustration that other people should act in ways that counteract the ambitions of the authors and others of their ilk. It is very likely, though, that had the writers of this book been aware that they were writing to a potential audience that was not friendly to their basic political worldview that they would have been at least a bit more careful in what they let slip about their aims and goals.
This book is a sizable one at about 600 pages of material, not including its appendices and other supplementary material. This material is then divided into ten somewhat large chapters written by a variety of historians from some varying perspectives. The book begins with a preface, after which there is a discussion of the first passage of blacks from Africa to North America from 1502-1619, in the period before English settlement, where the patterns of the Atlantic slave trade (the author largely neglects the Islamic slave trade, as is customary in these discussions) took place (1). After this there is a chapter on the creation of the African American identity within the colonies between 1619 and 1776, which includes the change of laws and the birth of literary African Americans capable of telling their own stories (2). This is followed by a chapter that discusses blacks as revolutionary citizens in the early period after independence to 1804 (3). After this comes another essay that discusses the rising and tensions concerning blacks and their state in society in antebellum American society (4). The next chapter after this discusses the freedom of blacks from slavery as well as the period of Reconstruction that followed to 1880 (5). At this point the book takes a turn that focuses on things that are increasingly relevant to contemporary politics, with a look at the nadir of relations between 1880 and 1900 (6) as well as an art essay on what Africa means to the author. This is followed by a look at the rising opportunities to some blacks in the first 29 years of the 20th century (7) as well as a look at the raw deal and new deal for blacks to the end of World War II (8). The book then ends with a chapter expressing the changes that black people brought to their world through political action (9), the struggles since 1970 (10), as well as a chronology, suggestion for further reading, info on the book's contributors, and an index.
By and large, this book suffers from a great many serious tensions between the desire of many of the authors of this book to celebrate the worthwhile achievements of black cultural figures, creative types, and entrepreneurs as well as the often snobbish leftist hostility to matters of business and focus on political power and a narrow socialist political ideology. This is related to other tensions that the authors seem not to be fully aware about that hinder the reader's enjoyment of this work. For one, many of the authors wish to condemn the widespread belief among many whites that blacks and whites cannot live at peace in an egalitarian multiracial society, a belief that has been extant from at least late colonial times to the present day. Yet other writers undercut this by supporting violent anti-white and anti-capitalist and indeed anti-democratic revolutionary politics that indicate that such people cannot live peacefully in a genuinely American society, and that there is at least a sizable and culturally relevant activist class that is worthy of considerable hostility from mainstream America on grounds of self-preservation alone. The authors seem unwilling to understand and reflect upon what it is that brings elevation to their people at all, and a sense of frustration that other people should act in ways that counteract the ambitions of the authors and others of their ilk. It is very likely, though, that had the writers of this book been aware that they were writing to a potential audience that was not friendly to their basic political worldview that they would have been at least a bit more careful in what they let slip about their aims and goals.
July 16, 2020
If 2020 has you interested in US history, skip right past all the major news networks and pick up this collection. No other source will provide depth and clarity on the African American experience. Must read to understand today's world.
October 31, 2021
Although somewhat dated it still delivers powerful essays in the history of African Americans.
June 29, 2019
Love
Got this book for my class, this book was so good and very informative and I now understand more why some people act the way they act this book shows blacks are still being treated like second hand citizens.
Got this book for my class, this book was so good and very informative and I now understand more why some people act the way they act this book shows blacks are still being treated like second hand citizens.
January 4, 2009
Wow . . just wow.
June 7, 2008
Wonderful overview of African American history, written by many of the best scholars in the field.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews