"Provides information about the history and celebration of more than 100 holidays, festivals, and other events observed by Americans of African descent. Features include narrative overviews, chronology of historical events related to holidays and festivals, calendar and geographical listings of observances, bibliography, and contact information and web sites"--Provided by publisher.

Presents more than 100 diverse holidays and festivals observed by Americans of African descent, exploring their history, customs, and symbols. Also includes a chronology, bibliography, and index.

African-American Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations presents the history, customs, symbols, and lore of more than 100 diverse holidays and festivals celebrated by Americans of African descent in the United States. Events covered include historical and contemporary African-American holidays--ranging from slave observances to Kwanzaa.

African-American Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations presents the history, customs, symbols, and lore of diverse holidays and festivals celebrated by Americans of African descent in the United States. Events covered include historical and contemporary African-American holidays ranging from slave observances to Kwanzaa.

With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation. Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning. Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American -- not just an African American -- day of commemoration.

Provides insight into the beliefs and values of different peoples, primarily people of color, by looking at the holidays and celebrations (religious and nonreligious) which play an important part in their lives. Following a month-by-month format, the publication looks at holidays, which mainstream America consider traditional, through the perspectives of women and people of color and provides info. about holidays which are of particular importance to these groups. Includes holidays of: Chinese, African-American, Islamic, Hispanic, Jewish, Native American, and other celebrations. Includes info. on lunar, solar, and scientifically manipulated calendars.