What is African American History?

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745695907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Scholarship on African American history has changed dramatically since the publication of George Washington Williams' pioneering A History of the Negro Race in America in 1882. Organized chronologically and thematically, What is African American History? offers a concise and compelling introduction to the field of African American history as well as the black historical enterpriseÑpast, present, and future. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie discusses many of the discipline's important turning points, subspecialties, defining characteristics, debates, texts, and scholars. The author explores the growth and maturation of scholarship on African American history from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until the field achieved significant recognition from the 'mainstream' U.S. historical profession in the 1970s. Subsequent decades witnessed the emergence and development of key theoretical approaches, controversies, and dynamic areas of concentration in black history, the vibrant field of black women's history, the intriguing relationship between African American history and Black Studies, and the imaginable future directions of African American history in the twenty-first century.

What is African American History? will be a practical introduction for all students of African American history and Black Studies.

1
From the Margins to the Mainstream

In 1925, a mere decade after he began his unrelenting quest to institutionalize, legitimize, and popularize the then-marginalized study of African American history by founding the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), Carter G. Woodson, “The Father of Black History,” reflected: “whereas a decade ago only a few institutions gave the study of the record of the Negro any consideration, practically all reputable universities and colleges and even some high schools now feature the study of the Negro in that of racial relations or provide special courses in this neglected aspect of our life and history.”¹ More than three decades later, historian John Hope Franklin, who by this time had established himself as a leading authority on black history with his From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (1947), echoed Woodson's optimistic sentiments in a state-of-the-field essay, “The New Negro History” (1957).

Though Franklin acknowledged the “far-reaching” and “deadly” impact of racist US historiography, he was very optimistic about the progress made by what he dubbed “the new Negro history.” For Franklin, what he described as a sort of renaissance in African American history between the late 1930s and the late 1950s was “as significant and, in some ways, even more dramatic than the very events themselves that the writers have sought to describe.”² He portrayed “the new Negro history” of the late 1950s in a manner that suggests that he truly believed that the study of African American history had gained a somewhat secure footing in the mainstream (i.e., white-male-dominated) US historical profession and even in scholarly communities abroad. Franklin surmised that black history had “come into its own” and that “White and Negro historians, Northern and Southern historians, Japanese and Dutch historians have turned their attention to the study of the history of the Negro in the United States.” He added: “Every major historical association in this country in the past ten years has given considerable attention to subjects related to Negro history at its annual meetings … For the first time in the history of the United States, there is a striking resemblance between what historians are writing and what has actually happened in the history of the American Negro.”³

African American history's positioning vis-à-vis the mainstream US historical profession has changed in many significant ways since Woodson and Franklin imparted their aforementioned observations. Ultimately seeking to substantiate and publicize the profound influence that African Americans had on the development of American history, Woodson, Franklin, their predecessors, as well as their pre-Black-Power-era disciples were concerned and often preoccupied with integrating African American history into mainstream US history. A prevailing characteristic of the field for more than half of its existence, the movement to transport African American history from the margins into the mainstream of US historiography and the US historical profession was, in a sense, part of the broader black freedom struggle.

One of the most sudden, conspicuous, and thought-provoking defining moments in the evolution of the study of black history – from a marginalized subject of intellectual inquiry primarily embraced and produced by African American activists, writers, and professionally trained scholars to a field with noticeable mainstream scholarly curiosity – clearly materialized beginning in the late 1960s, coinciding with the early years of the turbulent Black Power movement, the black student movement, and the Black Studies movement. This almost spur-of-the-moment mainstream awareness and symbolic sanctioning of African American history during the late 1960s is undeniable, yet it is a more complex phenomenon than historians have acknowledged. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, more than a few historians, including prominent white male US historians like C. Vann Woodward and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reiterated Woodson's and Franklin's encouraging sentiments about an increased mainstream interest in African American history. During the 1980s and 1990s, leading African Americanists periodically continued to draw attention to African American history's more anchored presence in the mainstream US historical profession. “Today Afro-American history is a respected and legitimate field of American history,”⁴ remarked Darlene Clark Hine in 1986. A decade later, Thomas C. Holt surmised that the “black experience has ceased to be a peripheral topic in American history; it is now among the central phenomena of the national experience.”⁵

Nearly a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, historians of black America are no longer preoccupied with demonstrating or proclaiming the mainstream status or legitimacy of the study of African American history. African American history is now certainly an established and flourishing field of scholarly endeavor with its own frequently invoked traditions, productive institutions, distinctive theoretical constructs and methods, lively subspecialties, vast historiography, and recognizable niche in the mainstream US historical profession.

Like US history in general and its numerous subfields, African American history as a distinct field of historical inquiry has undergone a host of transformations over the last century. It is important to understand how what was most often called Negro history until the late 1960s, and what we now interchangeably call African American history and black history, became the dynamic and familiar field that it is today. Since the late nineteenth century, historians have appraised the evolution of the US historical profession and American historiography. At the same time, very few historians have explored the intriguing development of African American history as a distinct scholarly field.

From the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century, most authors of widely read monographs on American historiography and the US historical profession largely ignored African American history or minimized the contributions of the field's most innovative scholars. In the late 1950s, one historian of the black past was correct in concluding that “the literature on American historiography has had almost nothing to say about Negroes.”⁶ In his classic History: Professional Scholarship in America, first published in 1965 and periodically reprinted and updated until 1990, John Higham neglected to mention the contributions of African American historians and African American history as a field. The third edition of Ernst Breisach's Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (2007) was advertised as containing a “compelling” section on African American history. Yet he grossly misinterprets the field by stating in passing: “Carl Degler began the integration of Afro-American history into mainstream American history.”⁷ Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988) and Ellen Fitzpatrick's History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880–1980 (2002) are the first major monographs on the American historical profession to discuss African American history in substantive ways.⁸

Earl E. Thorpe produced the first major study of the black historical craft, Negro Historians in the United States (1958), later revised and updated as Black Historians: A Critique (1971). He focused solely on the historical writings of “any American of color who wrote history” from the early nineteenth century until the late 1950s. A prevailing argument of Thorpe's is that the black historians featured in his book remained largely committed to Carter G. Woodson's corrective and black pride-instilling brand of historical writing, in turn employing “black history as a weapon in the fight for racial equality.”⁹ Though he defined black history in a reflectful manner, demarcated salient distinctions between the various generations of black historians, and offered insightful suggestions for the future cultivation of the field, Thorpe's work is more of a collection of intellectual biographies on amateur and professionally-trained black historians than it is a comprehensive assessment of the growth and evolution of African American history as a field or profession.

In 1986, two important works focusing on the study of African American history were published: The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future edited by Darlene Clark Hine, and August Meier and Elliott Rudwick's Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980. The first studies of their kind, these works complicated and revised previous representations of the US historical profession and historiography by offering expansive historical overviews of African American history as a field of study.¹⁰ The State of Afro-American History brought together a collection of papers that were delivered at an American Historical Association-sponsored conference on black history in October 1983 at Purdue University. The participants agreed that “the time has come to assess and evaluate the historical outpourings of the last several decades” and to overview areas of future research and dissemination.¹¹ In a brief essay in this volume, “On the Evolution of Afro-American History,” John Hope Franklin identified four generations of scholarship in black history from 1882 until the mid-1980s signaled by different publications and events. In Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (1986), still one of the most comprehensive overviews of the African American historical enterprise, August Meier and Elliott Rudwick provide a detailed periodization of the field, sub-dividing African American historiography into five phases from approximately 1915 until 1980 and probing into innumerable historians' contributions. While Franklin's concise essay overviews broad contours of the field's maturation over a century and complicates conventional interpretations of its hasty integration into institutions of higher education, it does not delve into the nuances of the field's evolution. On the other hand, Meier and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• What is History? series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: From the Margins to the Mainstream
• 2: The Burgeoning of African American History
• 3: Black Women's History
• 4: History, Historians, and African American Studies
• 5: African American History in the New Millennium
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement