The Harvard Guide to African-American History

“I have just returned from a joyous if exhausting walk in the woods. Call it the W. E. B. Du Bois National Park of African American History. There, I found well-traveled paths and hints of future trails beneath the underbrush. Here and there stand weathered statues of known ancestors and memorials to the unknown. One comes upon little kiosks hawking memorabilia—your mammy sugar jars, your lawn jockeys, your Topsy/Little Eva salt-and-pepper shakers. There are vistas where one could bear witness to the breadth and magnificence of the uncharted terrain below. There are also wide swaths damaged by the aggressive deforestation of historical indifference and the clandestine (and then again not-so-very secretive) dumping of poisons. My tour guide through this thicket of profoundly American beauty?… The Harvard Guide to African-American History [which]—in its very vastness, its horizonless terrain—promises that far from limiting history, African American scholarship is on the case. It is liberating it.”—Lisa Kennedy, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

“This massive guide, sponsored by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University and compiled by renowned experts, offers a compendium of information and interpretation on over 500 years of black experience in America… This single volume is commendable for its bibliographies and directories of library collections; its lists of web sites, photo archives, and film repositories; its fast and easy retrieval (by subject and author index); and its overall vastness… [T]his guide is ultimately an unparalleled authoritative reference tool to both print and nonprint resources on the experiences of people of African descent in America, making it an impressive complement to other reputable works such as Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. Highly recommended.”—Edward G. McCormack, Library Journal

“A valuable and, in many ways, an indispensable tool to study African-American history.”—Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone

“This single-volume source will be one of the first things scholars consult for research in all aspects of African-American life and culture. A great value of the work is the lists of titles, repositories, and collections. There is no question this will be a special and enduring reference work in the field of African-American studies that all of us in the field will want to own.”—David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass’ Civil War