This book features Skinner's 1903-1904 mission to Ethiopia which resulted in the signing of a treaty between the United States and Ethiopia to regulate commercial relations. The year 1903 marks, therefore, the beginning of official contact between Ethiopia and the United State, one of the earliest official engagements by the United States to the interior of sub-Saharan Africa. 2003 commemorates the 100th anniversary of this bold initiative that launched an important relationship that continues into the present day.

Ethiopia is clearly one of the most important countries in Africa. First of all, with about 75 million people, it is the third most populous country in Africa. Second, it is very strategically located, in the Horn of Africa and bordering Eritrea, Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia, with some of whom it has touchy and sometimes worse relations. Yet, its capital – Addis Ababa – is the headquarters of the African Union, the prime meeting place for Africa’s leaders. So, if things went poorly in Ethiopia, this would not be good for Africa, and for a long time this was the case, with internal disruption rife, until it was literally suppressed under the strong rule of the recently deceased Meles Zenawi. The Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia, Second Edition covers the history of Ethiopia through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has several hundred cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Ethiopia.

This insightful book relates how Emperor Haile Selassie helped shape America's image of Africa and how that image continues to evolve in the United States today. The Lion of Judah in the New World: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Shaping of Americans' Attitudes toward Africa tells the story of a dynamic ruler who influenced the perception of an entire continent. Documenting the Emperor's state visits to North America, the book explores U.S. foreign policy towards Ethiopia and Africa over two decades. At the same time, it seeks to understand why Haile Selassie enjoyed such celebrity in the United States and how he became so important in determining U.S. attitudes toward Africa. The book includes a brief biography of the Emperor and also explores the geography and long, colorful history of Ethiopia. The tensions and contradictions that marked Haile Selassie's life are highlighted in significant episodes that underscore his astute use of public relations and personal diplomacy. His leadership of postcolonial Africa during the Cold War is examined, as is his ultimate rejection by the United States in 1973 that marked the end of the monarchy and ushered in the tragic fratricide of Ethiopian civil war.

The first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. In Black Land, Nadia Nurhussein delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. Nurhussein navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1935, Nurhussein illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past? Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, Black Land presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia’s presence in African American culture was at its height.

This book provides a forum for intellectual exchange around the connections between nationalism and power in Africa, with Africa viewed as a global presence. Various chapters explore aspects of the colonial order, the nature of change and of agencies within a comparative perspective. Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa also interrogates African modernity and how it is constructed and articulated in comparison to other modernities. The chapters move from localism to globalism, and through various ideas and analyses we see modern Africa in a nuanced manner, a continent that is capable of accepting other cultures and traditions without losing all of its indigenous beliefs and values. The book exposes the power of traditions to reshape history, creating in different parts of the African diaspora the ideas to redefine lives and spaces and struggles to create a new future. Africans, like others, have their own ideas and constructions of modernity and modernism. They have, as the various contributions to this volume have amply demonstrated, staged modernity on their own terms, and in the process recast it in their own image.

The encyclopedia for the Horn of Africa treats all important terms of the history of ideas of this central region between Orient and Africa. After its completion the set will comprise five volumes four text and one index volume with altogether approx. 4000 articles. The topics range from basic data over archaeology, ethnology and anthropology, history, the languages and lit-eratures up to the art, religion and culture.

Explaining the issues and what is at stake in the current turmoil between Ethiopia and her neighbors, including Somalia, this informative and authoritative study presents the history of diplomatic relations and shifting alliances between the United States and Ethiopia in the context of Cold War politics, the roles of the Ethiopian Jews, and the Ethiopian diaspora in the West.