- New eBook additions
- All About Education
- Cozy ebooks for Fall
- Made in West Virginia
- A Shore Thing
- First in the series
- Strange New Worlds
- Worlds of Fantasy
- Most popular
- Available now
- Try something different
- Just Plain Good
- See all ebooks collections
With élan and erudition—and with winning enthusiasm—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger’s work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African-American history in question-and-answer format. Among the one hundred questions: Who were Africa’s first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was history’s wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history? Where was the first Underground Railroad? Who was the first black American woman to be a self-made millionaire? Which black man made many of our favorite household products better?
Here is a surprising, inspiring, sometimes boldly mischievous—all the while highly instructive and entertaining—compendium of historical curiosities intended to illuminate the sheer complexity and diversity of being “Negro” in the world.
Jacket images: (top, left to right, details) Thomas-Alexandre Dumas by Olivier Pichat. akg-images; Map of Spanish Florida and Jackie Robinson, both the Library of Congress, Wash. D.C.; (bottom, left to right) The Redemption of Ham by Modesto Brocos y Gómez. akg-images; Malcolm X, Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy; Madam C. J. Walker, the Library of Congress, Wash. D.C.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
October 24, 2017 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781524755331
- File size: 416816 KB
- Duration: 14:28:21
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
Publisher's Weekly
July 10, 2017
Harvard professor Gates (Life upon These Shores) leads readers on a broad and inviting tour of black history with this compendium modeled after journalist Joel Rogers’s 1957 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro. Gates’s version, an outgrowth of his writings published on the website the Root, consists of 100 brief essays written in a question-and-answer format on such wide ranging topics as “Who was the first black person to see the baby Jesus?”; “Who were the black passengers on the doomed Titanic voyage?”; and “What happened to Argentina’s black population?” Illustrated with one image per entry, the collection is peppered with information about little-known events in far-away places (such as Argentina, France, and Iraq) and far-removed times (the oldest entry covers ancient Greece). The work is particularly rich in 19th-century American history, with entries on Richard Potter, the first American ventriloquist; Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped slavery in Virginia in 1849 by shipping himself to Philadelphia in a cargo box; and on the raid on Harpers Ferry and the Colfax Massacre. Gates’s book is aimed at readers with limited knowledge of African-American history rather than scholars, and its tendencies toward exaggeration, titillation, irony, and debunking make for an easy romp, with enough obscure tidbits to entertain and inform specialists as well. Illus. -
AudioFile Magazine
Gates provides an updated version of the 1957 edition of this book, clarifying, updating, and enhancing it, as well as replacing some of the invalid information. Narrator Dominic Hoffman's deep and raspy voice serves as the perfect voice to capture Gates's writing. The importance of African-American communities to our nation (and for the world at large) comes across in the Hoffman's voice--he vocally communicates the gravitas of these figures and moments. From the first Africans to come to the Americas to hallmark moments by African-Americans in science, finance, literature, and political history, Gates recounts a deep and rich history, parts of which are still ignored even today. L.E. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
-
Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
subjects
Languages
- English
Loading
Why is availability limited?
×Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.
The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:
×Read-along ebook
×The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here.