This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of Black autobiography from the colonial era through Emancipation. Beginning with the 1760 narrative by Briton Hammond, William L. Andrews explores first-person public writings by Black Americans. Andrews includes but also goes beyond slave narratives to analyze spiritual biographies, criminal confessions, captivity stories, travel accounts, interviews, and memoirs. As he shows, Black writers continuously faced the fact that northern whites often refused to accept their stories and memories as sincere, and especially distrusted portraits of southern whites as inhuman. Black writers had to silence parts of their stories or rely on subversive methods to make facts tellable while contending with the sensibilities of the white editors, publishers, and readers they relied upon and hoped to reach.

Autobiography of a People is an insightfully assembled anthology of eyewitness accounts that traces the history of the African American experience. From the Middle Passage to the Million Man March, editor Herb Boyd has culled a diverse range of voices, both famous and ordinary, to creat a unique and compelling historical portrait: Benjamin Banneker on Thomas Jefferson Old Elizabeth on spreading the Word Frederick Douglass on life in the North W.E.B. Du Bois on the Talented Tenth Matthew Henson on reaching the North Pole Harriot Jacobs on running away James Cameron on escaping a mob lyniching Alvin Ailey on the world of dance Langston Hughes on the Harlem Renaissance Curtis Morriw on the Korean War Max ROach on "jazz" as a four-letter word LL Cool J on rap Mary Church Terrell on the Chicago World's Fair Rev. Bernice King on the future of Black America And many others.

Slave narratives were one of the earliest forms of African American writing. These works, autobiographical in nature, later fostered other pieces of African American autobiography. Since the rise of Black Studies in the late 1960s, leading critics have constructed black lives and letters as antitheses of the ways and writings of mainstream American culture. According to such thinking, black writing stems from a set of experiences very different from the world of whites, and black autobiography must therefore differ radically from heroic white American tales. But in pointing to differences between black and white autobiographical works, these critics have overlooked the similarities. This volume argues that the African American autobiography is a continuation of the epic tradition, much as the prose narratives of voyage by white Americans in the nineteenth century likewise represent the evolution of the epic genre. The book makes clear that the writers of black autobiography have shared and shaped American culture, and that their works are very much a part of American literature. An introductory essay provides a theoretical framework for the chapters that follow. It discusses the origins of African American autobiography and the larger themes of the epic tradition that are common to the works of both black and white authors. The book then pairs representative African American autobiographies with similar works by white writers. Thus the volume matches Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave with Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall. The study indicates that these various works all recognize the importance of learning as a means for attaining freedom. The final chapter provides a broad survey of the African American autobiography.

A collection of the best critical essays reflecting both older and newer perspectives. Will also contain an introduction by the editor (a respected scholar in the field), a chronology of the author's life, and an annotated bibliography.

With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period. Brief introductions preceding each text provide historical context and genre-specific interpretive prompts to foreground their significance. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts. The Earliest African American Literatures will change the way that students and scholars conceive of early American literature and the role of black Africans in the formation of that literature.

"These essays provide a rich portrait of how the self and its deepest commitments have driven some of the most important, vital scholarship of the last fifty years." —Georgia Historical Quarterly ". . . the writing is highly readable and informative for a non-academic audience curious about how history is written." —Magill Book Reviews To provide a context for understanding current race relations and the goals of the civil rights movement, the editors asked distinguished scholars to reflect upon their careers and how personal experiences have influenced their scholarship. Prominent historians Dan T. Carter, Eric Foner, Darlene Clark Hine, Jacqueline Jones, David Levering Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, Mark D. Naison, and George B. Tindall answered the call.