Description: Introducing readers to the wide variety of sources from which African history is constructed, the book's ten chapters cover human evolution, the domestication of plants and animals, climate change, social organization, the slave trade and colonization, development, and contemporary economics and politics.
Review Quotes:
"This book is an innovative, important, and courageous addition to African and world history scholarship. . . . Africa's Past is a much-needed text for teaching African history. Smythe not only provides an excellent survey of the latest research on Africa's past, she also presents a concise and clear argument as to why this history is relevant today."--African Studies Review
"Recommended."--Choice
"An impressive synthesis of current literature in African history, making it understandable and relevant to undergraduates."--Jan Bender Shetler, author of Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the
"Grapples with the narratives and facts and where they fit in global perspective, but why this is all salient and critically meaningful to our lives today in terms of lessons we can learn and ideas we can borrow. This is a unique approach not yet available on the market."--Catherine Cymone Fourshey, Susquehanna University