A Companion to African American History.

A Companion to African American History. Edited by Alton Hornsby Jr., Delores P. Aldridge, and Angela M. Hornsby. Blackwell Companions to American History. (Malden, Mass., and other cities: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Pp. xiv, 564. $131.95, ISBN 0-631-23066-1.)

Beginning with George Washington Williams's pioneering History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves ... (New York, 1883) and continuing to the present, scholars and intellectuals of the black experience in the United States have been motivated to demonstrate that African American history is a field worthy of serious study and essential to understanding the broader meaning of American history. A Companion to African American History., this recent addition to the Blackwell Companions to American History series, attests to the maturity of African American history as a discipline and its movement from the margins of academia to its role as a central component of the historical profession. Collectively, the authors assembled by Alton Hornsby Jr., professor of history at Morehouse College, and his colleagues demonstrate the breadth of African American history, its complexity, and its methodological diversity. In charting the "changing vicissitudes of African American historiography during the last two centuries," this collection of essays provides a useful entry for students into this dynamic field of historical inquiry while revealing the need for continued research and interpretations of the place of peoples of African descent in American and global history (p. 2).

This volume consists of thirty-one historiographical essays. It is divided into ten parts that are loosely organized chronologically and thematically. The essays cover a wide range of topics, including African and diasporic connections in the context of the transatlantic slave trade; colonial and antebellum African, European, and indigenous relations; processes of cultural exchange; war and emancipation; post-emancipation community and institution building; intersections of class and gender; migration; and struggles for civil rights.

Several essays address neglected subjects and chart new directions in scholarship. Shifting focus to the post-emancipation period, Frederick D. Opie provides an excellent discussion of peoples of African descent and race consciousness in the Caribbean and Latin America, demonstrating the importance of diasporic studies to the field's conceptual framework. Tiya Miles and Barbara Krauthamer impressively detail the experiences shared between African Americans and Native Americans. In linking the histories of slave rebellion and black abolitionism, Stanley Harrold provides a broad synthesis of antebellum black resistance and how historians approached the topic. Giving much-needed attention to the history of education in the black experience, Christopher M. Span and James D. Anderson situate the quest for "book learning" during and after slavery as a central theme in African American history. Surveying historical, cultural, and social scientific research, Juan J. Battle and Natalie D. A. Bennett review the contextually contingent place of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people in black life and history, demonstrating that scholars of African American history must overcome myopic views of whose past is worthy of documentation.

Despite these important contributions, the uneven quality of the essays and questionable topical omissions diminish the overall utility of the book as an advanced resource. Because they cover such a broad range of themes, the essays vary in structure, historiographical breadth, and focus. While most of the authors adopt a narrative approach, some provide an encyclopedic, and in certain instances cursory, review of the relevant literature.

Several key subjects receive insufficient attention, because of either problematic conceptual focus or outright omission. Haywood Farrar narrowly organizes his essay on the response by the black press to both world wars, overlooking several important works that demonstrate how African Americans at the grassroots level responded to the social, political, and economic exigencies of both conflicts. The essay by Marcellus C. Barksdale and Samuel T. Livingston suffers from a disjointed attempt to link historical moments of black "insurgency"--as diverse as post-emancipation migration, local NAACP activism, and the 1960s Black Studies Movement--to hip-hop as a cultural phenomenon. A systematic examination of class and color dynamics throughout African American history would have been a welcome addition to the collection.

Most glaring is the absence of an essay on the era of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction era stands as one of the pivotal periods of American history and a subject that has generated arguably the most seminal corpus of scholarship in African American history, beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois's landmark Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935). The omission of Reconstruction as the topic of a singular essay will alone frustrate advanced students and specialists.

A Companion to African American History, stands as a useful introduction to the study of African American history and its development. No doubt, students will benefit from this exposure to the breadth of African American historiography and possibly be inspired to address questions and explore subjects left unexamined.

CHAD L. WILLIAMS

Hamilton College