Joe William Trotter

Discusses the experiences of African Americans from the beginning of the depression in 1929 to the end of World War II.

"'After saying our good-byes to friends and neighbors, we all got in the cars and headed up the hill and down the road toward a future in Ohio that we hoped would be brighter,' Otis Trotter writes in Keeping Heart : A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine. Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Trotter and his thirteen siblings, the story begins in 1914 with his parents. By tracing the family's movement northward after the unexpected death of his father, this engaging chronicle illuminates the journeys not only of a black man born with heart disease in the southern Appalachian coalfields, but of his family and community. This testament to the importance of ordinary lives fills a gap in the literature on an underexamined aspect of American experience: the lives of African Americans in rural Appalachia and in the nonurban endpoints of the Great Migration"--

Documentary literature on African American history has largely neglected the significance of the industrial age in transforming the social, economic, and political patterns of black life in the United States. African Americans in the Industrial Age: A Documentary History, 1915-1945 fills that gap by providing a wide selection of documents that re-create the social history of African Americans during this watershed period. Oral life histories, memoirs, letters, newspaper accounts, federal surveillance reports, employment records, and photographs are among the primary sources contained in this work.

Under the editorship of Joe W. Trotter and Eric Ledell Smith, African Americans in Pennsylvania offers the most comprehensive history of the state's black history to date. Chapters emphasize the interplay of class and race from the origins of the Commonwealth during the seventeenth century, through the era of deindustrialization in the late twentieth century. We see not only poor and working-class people but also educated business and professional people. And despite the traditional focus on the experiences of black men, this volume includes significant research on black women. Most important, this volume suggests a conceptual framework for a historical synthesis of the state's African American experience. African Americans in Pennsylvania shows how ordinary people have influenced the culture, institutions, and politics of African American communities in Pennsylvania. In the process, it documents the ways that black people have influenced, and continue to influence, the state as a whole.