Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present - Hardcover

Painter, Nell Irvin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195137558 ISBN 13: 9780195137552

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Here is a magnificent account of a past rich in beauty and creativity, but also in tragedy and trauma. Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter blends a vivid narrative based on the latest research with a wonderful array of artwork by African American artists, works which add a new depth to our understanding of black history.
Painter offers a history written for a new generation of African Americans, stretching from life in Africa before slavery to today's hip-hop culture. The book describes the staggering number of Africans--over ten million--forcibly transported to the New World, most doomed to brutal servitude in Brazil and the Caribbean. Painter looks at the free black population, numbering close to half a million by 1860 (compared to almost four million slaves), and provides a gripping account of the horrible conditions of slavery itself. The book examines the Civil War, revealing that it only slowly became a war to end slavery, and shows how Reconstruction, after a promising start, was shut down by terrorism by white supremacists. Painter traces how through the long Jim Crow decades, blacks succeeded against enormous odds, creating schools and businesses and laying the foundations of our popular culture. We read about the glorious outburst of artistic creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, the courageous struggles for Civil Rights in the 1960s, the rise and fall of Black Power, the modern hip-hop movement, and two black Secretaries of State. Painter concludes that African Americans today are wealthier and better educated, but the disadvantaged are as vulnerable as ever.
Painter deeply enriches her narrative with a series of striking works of art--more than 150 in total, most in full color--works that profoundly engage with black history and that add a vital dimension to the story, a new form of witness that testifies to the passion and creativity of the African-American experience.

* Among the dozens of artists featured are Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, and Kara Walker

* Filled with sharp portraits of important African Americans, from Olaudah Equiano (one of the first African slaves to leave a record of his captivity) and Toussaint L'Ouverture (who led the Haitian revolution), to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X

About this title

About the Author:

Nell Irvin Painter is the Edward Professor of American History at Princeton. A former Director of Princeton's Program in African-American Studies, she is the author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol and Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919.

Review:

"A successful hybrid of art and narrative, arranged chronologically and invitingly."--Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Fascinating...filled with powerful images of black art from photographs to paintings to quilts that tell the story of black America.... Readers interested in black American art and history will appreciate this beautiful and well-researched book."--Booklist

"A sweeping, historic narrative with the emotional expression of more than 150 works of African-American art."--Ebony

"Nell Irvin Painter is a towering intellectual figure and pre-eminent historian in American life. This overarching narrative is the best we have that makes sense of the doings and sufferings of black people from 1619 to 2005."--Cornel West, Princeton University

"A brilliant historian, Nell Irvin Painter has written an innovative account of African Americans from the colonial era to our own. She challenges us to think critically about the historical meanings conveyed via artistic creations. In other words, Creating Black America offers a new way of knowing, imagining, and visualizing the past of our present."--Darlene Clark Hine, co-author of The African-American Odyssey

"There is a philosopher's axiom, 'To be is to be perceived.' Nell Painter's fascinatingly significant Creating Black Americans captures its subject-matter through the self-images people of color have produced over time. She has written a critical history of self-perception that deserves wide review and lively discussion."--David Levering Lewis, University Professor and Professor of History, New York University

"Utilizing her pathbreaking approach to historical writing, a hallmark in her brilliant career, Nell Painter interweaves straight-forward narrative with the vivid portraits of black artists to record how an unloved people created a vibrant but still endangered black America."--Derrick Bell, author of Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform

"From the Triangle Trade to Russel Simmons, this comprehensive review of African American history is a lively, lucid and indispensable resource. Nell Painter is our foremost chronicler of the black experience in the United States."--Patricia Williams, Columbia University School of Law

"Nell Irvin Painter brings her considerable skills and insight to 'Creating Black Americans.' Her excellent introduction to the black American experience will serve any interested reader well.... History, the author notes, exists in both the past and present. What we wish to know and how we understand it changes over time. And Painter's compelling use of black art, mostly created since the mid-20th century, to illustrate earlier times, emphasizes this point to great effect."--Kenneth R. Janken, New York Post

"Enriching on several levels, Creating Black Americans is a masterpiece because it offers a deeper understanding of all the painful suffering and adversity endured by a proud and determined people, while simultaneously bearing witness to a cultural legacy equally rich with strength, hope and faith."--Baltimore Afro-American

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0195137558
• ISBN 13: 9780195137552
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480