Children of Fire: A History of African Americans

by Thomas C. Holt

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 Children of Fire , 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.

Genres: History, Race, African American, Nonfiction, American History, School

464 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2010

About the author

Professor Thomas Cleveland Holt taught at Howard University, Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Pamela Mikita · Rating 4 out of 5]

African American history should be required, not an elective. I don’t think we will overcome our race issues until the history is revealed to all. Very well written.

[Bookluvr7 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A school book, but an excellently written and researched history book. There was a ton of information in here that I hadn’t known before and made me understand the history of African Americans in a whole new way that I didn’t learn in school before. I’m very happy to have read this book. I wish there had been footnotes though where the information was from instead of notes because it was a bit hard for me to understand.

5/5⭐️

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long Read

This was a long read for me, but I'm glad I have. It was not what I expected, but better. The author took individuals who have left journal and other writings about their lives. He wove them together in primarily a chronological order as examples of the changes and reasons for the changes in lives, attitudes, experiences and possibilities for African Americans in the U. S.

[Allie Sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

At points, this book was very dense, and I had to read at a much slower pace to absorb everything, but it is one of the most thorough historical books I've ever read. Larger contexts are given to events like reconstruction, and the author always provides different discussions that individuals and historians have had on specific topics.