The pre-Civil War autobiographies of famous fugitives such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs form the bedrock of the African American narrative tradition. After emancipation arrived in 1865, former slaves continued to write about their experience of enslavement and their upward struggle to realize the promise of freedom and citizenship. Slave Narratives After Slavery reprints five of the most important and revealing first-person...

A five-volume set and supplement covering all aspects of the African-American experience from 1619 to the present day. Using biographies, historical essays, and thematic pieces, many written by foremost scholars, it addresses a wide array of subjects in over 2,300 articles to define in one source the cultural roots, participation in American life, and current condition of the African-American community.

Tells the story of the Irish ancestry of Barack Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. "Her great-great grandfather who immigrated from the small village of Moneygall in Ireland to the Scioto Valley in Ohio, and of his relatives who made the journey before him. This Irish family, the Kearneys, came first to Baltimore, Maryland, then moved west with the frontier to Ohio ... [and] further, to Indiana ... before many of the Dunhams and Kearneys moved on to Kansas,...

""Willie J. Harrell's We Wear the Mask focuses its attention upon the most recent and influential Dunbar scholarship, and in doing so refreshes our vision of the man, the artist, his work, and how intensely he skillfully maneuvered his way through the dangerous political, social, and aesthetic pitfalls of dialect and standard English. This volume not only asks but requires us to rethink the African American voices as well as the characters Dunbar...

" ... [Draws from] letters, diary entries, speeches, articles, messages and poems to provide an incomparable literary portrait of a nation at war with itself, while illuminating the military and political events that brought the Union to final victory and slavery and secession to their ultimate destruction ..."--Dust jacket flap.