To Make Our World Anew

"To Make Our World Anew" reconstructs U.S. history through the experiences and struggles of black Americans.Written by a stellar team of historians, this volume offers a panoramic view of black life, rich with first-person accounts that invite readers to view the past through the eyes of African Americans. Beginning with the African background and the colonisation of the AMericas, "To Make Our World Anew" examines the transformation of slavery from a brutal form of indentured servitude to a full-blown system of racial domination; the critical role African Americans played in shaping and ultimately destroying American racial slavery; their unflagging efforts to define freedom, not only for themselves but for the entire nation; and the ways in which industrial and post-industrial transformations shaped black life, thought, culture, and resistence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet this is not a story of victims, but a dramatic saga of a people who dared to fight back: a people who quite literally reamade America several times over. In spite of their condition, African Americans were still human beings endowed with intellect, creativity, and vision. They came to North American shores from various ethnic groups and speaking many languages, but they forged a strong sense of community and created new identities from their ethnic past and racial present. The authors pay special attention to difference and diversity. By exploring the hidden social and cultural history of women and ordinary working people (free and slave), they paint a fully textured portrait of black communities that cosiders divisions by gender, class, colour, and sexuality. And the authors extend their vision beyond the united States, examining the impact of key events such as the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish-American War. By acknowledging African Americans as part of a larger African diaspora, the book links the struggles of blacks in the United States to those of displaced Africans throughout the world. With new insightand impeccable scholarship, "To Make Our World Anew" dramatically demonstrates how generations of Africa's descendeants, in their ongoing quest for freedom, have transformed our world and made it a better place - for everyone.

Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor of History and Africana Studies at New York University. He is the author of "Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression", which received the Eliot Rudwick Prize of the Organization of American Historians, and "Yo Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America". He lives in New York City Earl Lewis is vice provost and dean of the graduate school and professor of history and Afroamerican studies at the University of Michigan. He served as director of the university's Centre for Afroamerican and African Studies from 1990 to 1993 and has been dean since 1998. Professor Lewis is the author of "In their own interests: Race, Class, and Power in 20th Century Norfolk" and co-author of "Blacks in the Industrial Age: A Documentary History". He lives in Ann Arbor