The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Antebellum Free Communities [Paperback]

Elizabeth Rauh Bethel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312218362 | ISBN-13: 978-0312218362 | Publication Date: January 15, 1999

Spanning the eight decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, The Roots of African-American Identity focuses on the lives of African Americans in the nominally free northern and western states. This book explores how a group of marginalized people crafted a uniquely New World ethnic identity that informed popular African American historical consciousness. Elizabeth Rauh Bethel examines the way in which that consciousness fueled collective efforts to claim and live a promised but undelivered democratic freedom, helping readers to understand how African Americans reformulated and perceived their collective past. Bethel also reveals how this vision of freedom and historical consciousness shaped African American participation in the Reconstruction, formed the spiritual and ideological foundation for the modern Pan-African movement, and provided the historical legacy for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Comprehensive and engaging, The Roots of African-American Identity is an absorbing account of an often overlooked part of American history.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In this exquisite investigation of continuity and discontinuity in the past as experienced and remembered, Bethel (sociology, Lander Univ., South Carolina) explores how blacks in the North from 1775 to 1860 reformulated their collective past into a politicized racial identity that informed a moral community of collective action. Bethel's evocative reading of the times and political possibilities and realities as blacks crafted a group identity to mobilize themselves and others offers a suggestive complement to historian James O. Horton's Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (LJ 5/1/93) and his new In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (Oxford Univ., 1997). Highly recommended for collections on the pre-Civil War United States or African Americans.?Thomas Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Bethel provides us with a very insightful study of the black experience in America.” —The Washington Times

“Highly recommended for collections on the pre-Civil War United States or African Americans.” —Library Journal

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (January 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312218362
• ISBN-13: 978-0312218362
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,273,116 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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