This multidisciplinary volume highlights the African presence throughout the Americas, and African and African Diasporan contributions to the material and cultural life of all of the Americas, and of all Americans. It includes articles from leading scholars and from cultural leaders from both well-known and little-known African Diasporan communities. Privileging African Diasporan voices, it offers new perspectives, data, and interpretations that challenge prevailing understandings of the Americas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

An introduction to the complex relationship between African Americans and the African continent What is an “African American” and how does this identity relate to the African continent? Rising immigration levels, globalization, and the United States’ first African American president have all sparked new dialogue around the question. This book provides an introduction to the relationship between African Americans and Africa from the era of slavery to the present, mapping several overlapping diasporas. The diversity of African American identities through relationships with region, ethnicity, slavery, and immigration are all examined to investigate questions fundamental to the study of African American history and culture.

The book 'Discovering Our African Culture' reveals the rich African heritage every Broadway family member and every African American can know about their deep roots and culture. Four book Author Eugene Broadway takes the reader on yet another journey in history; this time going beyond the slavery of his ancestors. In this book he unearths more legacy through the: History of Africans and African Americans during the 1800s, 1700s, and even 1600s. Journey to modern-day Africa to discover his rich culture. Discovery of Ghanian cultural path and Adinkra symbolism. Examination of multicultural societies through tribal practices. Celebration of African culture traditions. Accounts from African and African American writers. Stories of royal appointments and kingship. According to the author, Mr. Broadway, "We want to give back to the entire black race and shine a spotlight on the African American heritage for the entire human race to see." Slavery is where many people think that African American history began. The fact is slavery is where our history is entangled, stripped, hidden, denied textbook pages, submerged at sea, forbidden tradition, robbed of our heritage, and much more. Take the journey with Mr. Broadway, a look beyond slavery and get a glimpse of our African American's past through our ancestors' culture.

The Great Migration—the mass exodus of blacks from the rural South to the urban North and West in the twentieth century—shaped American culture and life in ways still evident today. In Fly Away, Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott trace the ideas that inspired African Americans to abandon the South for freedom and opportunity elsewhere. Black southerners fled the Low Country of South Carolina, the mines and mills of Birmingham, Alabama, the farms of the Mississippi Delta, and the urban wards of Houston, Texas, for new opportunities in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They took with them the South’s rich traditions of religion, language, music, and art, recreating and preserving their southern identity in the churches, newspapers, jazz clubs, and neighborhoods of America’s largest cities. Rutkoff and Scott’s sweeping study explores the development and adaptation of African American culture, from its West African roots to its profound and lasting impact on mainstream America. Broad in scope and original in its interpretation, Fly Away illuminates the origins, development, and transformation of national culture during an important chapter in twentieth-century American history.

Supplemented with quotes and engaging articles from USA TODAY, the Nation’s No. 1 Newspaper, The African American Experience shines a spotlight on African Americans and their many exciting contributions to U.S. society. From musicians and athletes to media and political leaders, African American people enrich American life. Writers such as Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison offer eye-opening glimpses into their lives and cultural history. Baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, tennis stars Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, and golf great Tiger Woods smashed cultural and racial barriers in professional sports. Artists such as W. C. Handy, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson dramatically changed the world’s musical landscape, while actor and media mogul Oprah Winfrey shaped television, film, and publishing. Political leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama wrought major shifts in U.S. society and government. Read this informative title to learn more about how African Americans contribute to the United States’ cultural mosaic, enriching our nation with a wide range of traditions, customs, and life experiences.

The Creolization of American Culture examines the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, and biography of the painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) as a lens through which to see the multiethnic antebellum world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy. As a young man living in the multiethnic working-class community of New York's Lower East Side, Mount took part in the black-white musical interchange his paintings depict. An avid musician and tune collector as well as an artist, he was the among the first to depict vernacular fiddlers, banjo players, and dancers precisely and sympathetically. His close observations and meticulous renderings provide rich evidence of performance techniques and class-inflected paths of musical apprenticeship that connected white and black practitioners. Looking closely at the bodies and instruments Mount depicts in his paintings as well as other ephemera, Christopher J. Smith traces the performance practices of African American and Anglo-European music-and-dance traditions while recovering the sounds of that world. Further, Smith uses Mount's depictions of black and white music-making to open up fresh perspectives on cross-ethnic cultural transference in Northern and urban contexts, showing how rivers, waterfronts, and other sites of interracial interaction shaped musical practices by transporting musical culture from the South to the North and back. The "Africanization" of Anglo-Celtic tunes created minstrelsy's musical "creole synthesis," a body of melodic and rhythmic vocabularies, repertoires, tunes, and musical techniques that became the foundation of American popular music. Reading Mount's renderings of black and white musicians against a background of historical sites and practices of cross-racial interaction, Smith offers a sophisticated interrogation and reinterpretation of minstrelsy, significantly broadening historical views of black-white musical exchange.