Life upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 Gates, Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated, landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship, and including more than eight hundred images--ancient maps, art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop on to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single Black Experience. Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination -- *Author: Gates, Henry Louis *Subtitle: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 *Publication Date: 2011/11/22 *Number of Pages: 487 *Binding Type: Hardcover *Language: English *Depth: 1.50 *Width: 9.50 *Height: 11.25

From the Publisher:
"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated, landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship, and including more than eight hundred images--ancient maps, art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop on to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single "Black Experience." Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination"--

Author Bio

Henry Louis Gates

In his memoir COLORED PEOPLE, Henry Louis Gates describes the place where he grew up: Piedmont, West Virginia. It was a middle-class African American community, where people took an interest in each other and where the little details of everyday life passed into local history. Gates studied at Harvard University, and became one of the country's foremost scholars of African American history and literature. He first made his name at Cornell and later at Yale, editing collections of slave narratives, and writing THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY. He was asked by Harvard to establish a world-class Black Studies department, to which he recruited leading scholars. A prodigious scholar himself, Gates assembled THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE, and created an entirely new online reference work, an encyclopedia of Africana based on the ideas first proposed by W.E.B. Dubois. He also edited lesser-known works by obscure writers, including Hannah Craft's THE BONDWOMAN'S NARRATIVE, which he believes is the first novel by a female slave. Gates is known to the general public as the host of several popular PBS series, including a series in which he traveled to Africa, one on genealogy called AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES, and, in 2007, FINDING OPRAH'S ROOTS, about the ancestry of TV personality Oprah Winfrey. In his personal life, Gates is a collector of memorabilia relating to the African American experience. In 2008, Henry Louis Gates was named editor-in-chief of The Root, an online magazine of the Washington Post Company.

Praise

"[T]his copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, 'to find a new way of looking' at the 'full sweep' of African-American history." 03/05/2012

Product Attributes

Book Format:		Hardcover
Number of Pages:		0487
Publisher:		Knopf Publishing Group

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Life upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 (Hardcover)

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