One of the largest empires the world has ever known, the Empire of Mali flourished in West Africa from 1235 CE until 1464. The empire remains well known for its wealth and significant cultural influence, still felt hundreds of years later, both in modern Mali and its neighbors. The language, laws, and customs of the Empire of Mali spread throughout West Africa and along the Niger River, creating an enduring legacy that continues to influence and characterize the region. The empire's rich history, enthralling folklore, transporting art and music, enduring cultural and political influence, and modern-day legacy are all presented here in vivid color and dynamic presentation, with a treasure trove of full-cover photographs, maps, illustrations, and artwork. Among other standards, this text supports Common Core's mandate regarding analyzing the relationship between primary and secondary sources, citing evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, and determining the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source.

Explores empires of medieval west Africa.

Learn what kind of food you might eat in Ancient China, what colors could only be worn by royalty, what kind of names parents picked, and what children in the Han Dynasty children did for fun.

Illuminating the Blackness presents the history of Brazil's race relations and African Muslim heritage. The book is divided into two parts. Part I explores the issue of race, anti-black racism, white supremacy, colourism, black beauty and affirmative action in contemporary Brazil. Part II examines the reports of African Muslims' travels to Brazil before the Portuguese colonisers, the slave revolts in Bahia and the West African Muslim communities in nineteenth century Brazil. The author explores the black consciousness movement in Brazil and examines the reasons behind the growing conversion to Islam amongst Brazilians, particularly those of African descent. The author also shares his insights into the complexities of race in Brazil and draws comparisons with the racial histories of the pre-modern Muslim world including a comparative analysis of the East African Zanj slave rebellions in ninth century Baghdad with the West African Hausa and Yoruba slave rebellions in nineteenth century Bahia.

A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region’s history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam’s growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste—long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.

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