African American History

A Very Short Introduction

By: Jonathan Scott Holloway

Narrated by: Diontae Black

Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. This book illuminates the US's core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being.

This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. This Very Short Introduction carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, author Jonathan Scott Holloway tells a story about American citizens' capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in America's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.

©2021, 2023 Oxford University Press (P)2023 Tantor

Excellent short book

This succinct history is excellent because it chooses events well to make major points, and it offers vital context. Despite being brief, it goes deeper than the simplistic national mythologies. It leaves out major themes such as housing, environmental and infrastructure racism, and it is light on employment, prosecution, and incarceration racism. It could also add even more of the absolutely extraordinary achievements of African Americans and how these successes have driven the U.S. towards strength and closer to reaching its founding ideals. The author had to make some difficult decisions in order to keep the book so short. It would be great for an updated version to add these thoughts and the post George Floyd era and the fall of the Voting Rights Act. Nevertheless, this is an excellent book.