Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

It is impossible to understand America without understanding the history of African Americans. In nearly seven hundred entries, the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895 documents the full range of the African American experience during that period-from the arrival of the firstslave ship to the death of Frederick Douglass-and shows how all aspects of American culture, history, and national identity have been profoundly influenced by the experience of African Americans. The Encyclopedia covers an extraordinary range of subjects. Major topics such as Abolitionism, Black Nationalism, the Civil War, the Dred Scott case, Reconstruction, Slave Rebellions and Insurrections, the Underground Railroad, and Voting Rights are given the in-depth treatment onewould expect. But the encyclopedia also contains hundreds of fascinating entries on less obvious subjects, such as the African Grove Theatre, Black Seafarers, Buffalo Soldiers, the Catholic Church and African Americans, Cemeteries and Burials, Gender, Midwifery, New York African FreeSchools, Oratory and Verbal Arts, Religion and Slavery, the Secret Six, and much more. In addition, the Encyclopedia offers brief biographies of important African Americans-as well as white Americans who have played a significant role in African American history-from Crispus Attucks, JohnBrown, and Henry Ward Beecher to Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Sarah Grimke, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, Phillis Wheatley, and many others. All of the Encyclopedia's alphabetically arranged entries are accessibly written and free of jargon and technical terms. To facilitate ease of use, many compositeentries gather similar topics under one headword. The entry for Slave Narratives, for example, includes three subentries: The SlaveNarrative in America from the Colonial Period to the Civil War, Interpreting Slave Narratives, and African and British Slave Narratives. A