Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was an American novelist, women's rights activist, abolitionist, journalist, and activist for Native American rights. Child is famous for her fiction and domestic manuals, which enjoyed international popularity during the mid 19th century. However, her work also drew controversy due to her tackling such issues as male dominance and white supremacy. First published in 1865, "The Freedmen's Book" contains a collection of...

Describes the spread of Africans to the western hemisphere and the influences and development of their culture.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Atlanta had the South's largest population of college-educated African Americans. The dictates of Jim Crow meant that these men and women were almost entirely excluded from public life, but as Karen Ferguson demonstrates, Roosevelt's New Deal opened unprecedented opportunities for black Atlantans struggling to achieve full citizenship. Black reformers, often working within federal agencies as...

Between World War I and World War II, African Americans' quest for civil rights took on a more aggressive character as a new group of black activists challenged the politics of civility traditionally embraced by old-guard leaders in favor of a more forceful protest strategy. Beth Tompkins Bates traces the rise of this new protest politics--which was grounded in making demands and backing them up with collective action--by focusing on the struggle...

In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s. By focusing on relationships among blacks, as well as on the more familiar struggles between the races, Penningroth exposes a dynamic process of community and family definition. He also includes...

Presents some of the ways that Africans influenced the history of the West including African-American contributions to medicine, mathematics, transportation, and architecture, and how the region's vocabulary still reflects African words and expressions.