"Explores the extent to which historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference"-- In the United States, a Black person is defined as any person with even one drop of Black blood. Blay explores how historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference. The contributors represent twenty-five countries, and provide...

"In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning social historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of six African Americans from the colonial era to the late 20th century, using their stories to illustrate the complex ways in which racial ideologies in this country have changed since the first Africans arrived on the nation's shores hundreds of years ago. The very idea of "blackness," she shows, has changed fundamentally over this period. For Antonio, an enslaved...

It was a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one's own. Hobbs explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with...

"When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims,...

"From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation,...

"For generations, Black colleges have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments have not only aided in students' education and advancement. They have also offered spaces to develop racial consciousness and analyze the paradoxes embodied in American culture. The development and politicization of students on the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) has resulted in waves of...

"Bringing together scholarly essays and helpfully annotated primary documents, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution collects not only the best recent scholarship on the subject, but also showcases the primary texts written by African Americans about the Haitian Revolution. Rather than being about the revolution itself, this collection attempts to show how the events in Haiti served to galvanize African Americans to think about themselves and...