Description: This landmark guide covers research into every aspect of African-American life and work, offering a compendium of information and interpretation about almost 400 years of African-Americans's experiences as an ethnic group and as Americans. A companion CD-ROM makes more than 15,000 bibliography entries available for computer searching.
Brief description: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African American Studies at Harvard University.
Review Quotes: I have just returned from a joyous if exhausting walk in the woods. Call it the W. E. B. Du Bois National Park of African American History. There, I found well-traveled paths and hints of future trails beneath the underbrush. Here and there stand weathered statues of known ancestors and memorials to the unknown. One comes upon little kiosks hawking memorabilia--your mammy sugar jars, your lawn jockeys, your Topsy/Little Eva salt-and-pepper shakers. There are vistas where one could bear witness to the breadth and magnificence of the uncharted terrain below. There are also wide swaths damaged by the aggressive deforestation of historical indifference and the clandestine (and then again not-so-very secretive) dumping of poisons. My tour guide through this thicket of profoundly American beauty?...The Harvard Guide to African-American History [which]--in its very vastness, its horizonless terrain--promises that far from limiting history, African American scholarship is on the case. It is liberating it.--Lisa Kennedy "Village Voice Literary Supplement" (4/1/2001 12:00:00 AM)