Sylviane A. Diouf

Describes aspects of contemporary life such as special traditions, religious beliefs, music, foods, ways of talking, and languages found among the people of Cajun country in Louisiana.

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others describe what it was like to spend their childhoods and teenage years under slavery.

A survey of the historical regions and kingdoms of West Africa including biographies of Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali (c. 1280-1337); Osei Tutu, King of Asante (c. 1660-1717); and Ndate Yalla Mbodj, Queen of Walo (c. 1810-1860).

Surveys historical regions and kingdoms of East Africa, with biographies of Ranavalona I, Queen of Madagascar; Yambio, King of the Azande; and Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia.

Sylviane A. Diouf reconstructs the lives of 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria who were brought ashore in Alabama in 1860 under cover of night, recounting their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describing their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. --from publisher description

Surveys historical regions and kingdoms of Southern Africa, with biographies of Nzinga Mbande, Queen of Angola; Shaka, King of the Zulu Nation; and Moshoeshoe, King of the Sotho.

"Black Power burst onto the world scene in 1966 with ideas, politics, and fashion that opened the eyes of millions of people across the globe. In the United States, the movement spread like wildfire: high school and college youth organized black student unions; educators created black studies programs; Black Power conventions gathered thousands of people from all walks of life; and books, journals, bookstores, and publishing companies spread Black Power messages and imagery throughout the country and abroad. Black Power aesthetics of natural hair and African-inspired fashion, ornaments, and home decor--and the concept that black was beautiful--resonated throughout the country. The black arts movement inspired the creation of some eight hundred black theaters and cultural centers, where a generation of writers and artists forged a new and enduring cultural vision. Published in conjunction with a major 2016 exhibit at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Black Power 50 includes original interviews with key figures from the movement, essays from today's leading Black Power scholars, and more than one hundred stunning images from the Schomburg's celebrated archives, offering a beautiful and compelling introduction to the history and meaning of this pivotal movement."--

"Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women's proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery. Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian specializing in the history of the African Diaspora, African Muslims, the slave trade and slavery. She is the author of Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 2013) and Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, and the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. "--

A survey of the historical regions and kingdoms of Central Africa including biographies of Afonso I, King of the Kongo (1456-1493); Shamba Bolongongo, King of the Bakuba (17th century); and Njoya, King of the Bamun (1867-1933).