Black History Month

The African-American Odyssey illuminates the central place of African-Americans in U.S. history by telling the story of what it has meant to be black in America and how African-American history is inseparably woven into the greater context of American history..

This is a fresh, innovative new African American history textbook that weaves together narrative and a wealth of carefully selected primary sources. The narrative focuses on the diversity of black experience and culture and the impact of African Americans on the nation as a whole. Every chapter contains two themed sets of written documents and a visual source essay, guiding students through the process of analyzing sources and offering the convenience and value of a "two-in-one" textbook and reader.

The black experience in America-- starting from its origins in western Africa up to the present day-- is examined in this seminal study from a prominent African American figure. The entire historical timeline of African Americans is addressed, from the Colonial period through the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The most recent scholarship on the geographic, social, economic, and cultural journeys of African Americans, together with vivid portraits of key black leaders, complete this comprehensive reference.

Four great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since the late 1960s, the arrival of black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. These epic migra­tions have made and remade African American life. Ira Berlin's magisterial new account of these passages evokes both the terrible price and the moving triumphs of a people forcibly and then willingly migrating to America.