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A Faithful Account of the Race:
African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America
(The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and
Culture)
by Stephen G. Hall
The University of North Carolina Press
The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular
awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as
Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals,
ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the
black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures
and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of
historical writing by African Americans.
Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and
maturation of African American historical writing from the period of
the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of
the field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works
borrowed from and engaged with mainstream intellectual movements
including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism.
Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that
simultaneously reinforced and offered counternarratives to more
mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the
influence of the African Diaspora on the development of historical
study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African
American history informed by developments within and outside the
African American community.
List Price: $22.95
Visit Stephen G. Hall online at
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Photo by Roshawne A. Hall
OVERVIEW
Historical work by African Americans early on served to
construct a complex black subject who transcended the narrow
confines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life. Likewise,
in this study, my goal is to shift the perspective from the external
conditions that African Americans experienced for more than half of
the nineteenth century, manacled as they were by chains and fetters,
and to look at their historical production through their own eyes,
dreams, and visions. Here, African Americans represent more than
stolen property, chattel in the bottom of slaves ships, and beasts
of burden in the Americas. They are also thinking, rational, and
critically engaged human beings. Focusing on their textual
production brings this point into broad relief. The texts under
study here tell a uniquely nineteenth-century story of the emergence
of the book as an increasingly important indicator or measure of
intellectual worth and ability in a larger society determined to
negate black humanity. Books served as barometers of what types of
contributions blacks could make to racial as well as national
literature.From A Faithful
Account of the Race: African American
Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century
America by Stephen G. Hall. Copyright © 2009
by the University of North Carolina Press.
Used by permission of the publisher.
www.uncpress.unc.edu
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