From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans

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Alfred A. Knopf, 1994 - History - 680 pages
Since its original publication in 1947, From Slavery to Freedom has maintained its preeminence as the most authoritative history of African Americans. Surveying a vast human odyssey of more than a thousand years, co-authors John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., vividly detail the journey of African Americans from their origin in the civilizations of Africa, through slavery in the Western Hemisphere, to the successful struggle for freedom in the West Indies, Latin America, and the United States. This seventh edition has been thoroughly revised to include expanded coverage of Africa, additional material on the situation of African Americans in the United States, and two new four-page color inserts. The authors discuss the history of blacks in the Caribbean and Latin America as it relates to the history of African Americans in the United States. Incorporating recent scholarship, chapters covering slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction have been rewritten. Material covering the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century has been expanded. The period between World War I and World War II (including the Harlem Renaissance) has also been extensively revised to reflect new scholarship and new interpretations. In keeping with the authors' view that this is a history of all the people, there has been a significant increase in material dealing with popular culture. All who are interested in the current quest for equality of African Americans will find a wealth of information based on recent findings and from many scholars. Professors Franklin and Moss have captured the tragedies and triumphs, the hurts and joys, the failures and successes, of blacks in a lively and readable style.

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Contents

Land of Their Ancestors
1
Olaudah Equiano Gustavus Vassa Describes His Homeland1756
9
The African Way of Life
12
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

The son of an attorney who practiced before the U.S. Supreme Court, John Hope Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma on January 2, 1915. He received a B. A. from Fisk University in 1935 and a master's degree in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941 from Harvard University. During his career in education, he taught at a numerous institutions including Brooklyn College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Duke University. He also had teaching stints in Australia, China, and Zimbabwe. He has written numerous scholarly works including The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956); Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961); The Emancipation Proclamation (1963); and The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century (1993). His comprehensive history From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (1947) is generally acknowledged to be the basic survey of African American history. He received numerous awards during his lifetime including the Medal of Freedom in 1995 and the John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities in 2006. He worked with Thurgood Marshall's team of lawyers in their effort to end segregation in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education and participated in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the American Studies Association. He was also a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and served on the U.S. Commission for UNESCO and the Committee on International Exchange of Scholars. He died of congestive heart failure on March 25, 2009 at the age of 94.

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