The African-American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience - Hardcover

9780684312576: The African-American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684312573 ISBN 13: 9780684312576

Publisher: Charles Scribner & Sons, 2002

It is widely recognized that American history consists not of a single, unitary narrative, but of many narratives shaped by race, gender, and ethnic origins. The African American Years is a companion to Charles Scribners Sons chronology of U.S. history The American Years, second edition. Whereas that reference work examined U.S. history in its entirety, The African American Years focuses specifically on the history of African Americans from pre-colonial times to the present. This timeline is enriched by overview essays, sidebars, and primary sources - poems, memoirs, legal documents - and more than two hundred images that chronicle the story of African Americans and create a portrait encompassing its struggles, triumphs, complexity, and exuberance.

Features include a comprehensive index; sidebars spotlighting specific people and topics; approximately 250 images; and a bibliography.

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From Booklist:

When it was published in 1998, Scribner's The American Years: A Chronology of United States History was one of the few chronologies besides the standard Encyclopedia of American Facts and Dates (10th ed., HarperCollins, 1997) to focus on the U.S. Gale has recently published a second edition of The American Years (2002) and has also expanded it into a series by adding chronologies that are more specific. The first of these deals with the history of African Americans.

Whereas The American Years provides detailed year-by-year coverage, the chronological portion of The African American Years takes up just 65 pages. It extends from 1444 to 2002, with entries for events grouped by year and ranging from a sentence to a paragraph in length. The entries are heavily cross-referenced to what is actually the major part of the volume, six lengthy sections that cover the periods from "The Colonial Period and the Revolutionary War" to the Civil Rights era and beyond. These sections provide general overviews; discussions of more particular topics, such as "African Americans on the Frontier" and "The African American Literary Experience"; bibliographies; and fairly extensive selections of primary documents. Sidebars and black-and-white illustrations complement the text. The volume concludes with a general index and an index to primary source material.

To describe this volume as a chronology is somewhat misleading, for it offers much more than a strictly "what happened when" perspective. At the same time, the researcher who wants exactly that perspective would be better served by other titles, such as Gale's own Chronology of African American History (2d ed., 1997), which provide more year-by-year detail. The African American Years is recommended for high-school, public, and academic libraries as a useful guide to black history and a complement to works such as The African American Encyclopedia (2d ed., Marshall Cavendish, 2000) and Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History (Macmillan, 1996). RBB
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Review:

"The first part is a timeline covering the sweep of African American history, pinpointing key years and recording significant events within them. The second contains essays, excerpts of primary documents, and sidebars to provide context as a background for understanding the significance of events and relating them to the larger story of African American history."
-- "Reference and Research Book News" (May 2002)

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