The Cause of Freedom, Jonathan Scott Holloway
The Cause of Freedom, Jonathan Scott Holloway
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The Cause of Freedom
A Concise History of African Americans

Author: Jonathan Scott Holloway

Narrator: Bill Andrew Quinn

Unabridged: 4 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/25/2021


Synopsis

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question.

If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being.

This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning.

About Jonathan Scott Holloway

Jonathan Scott Holloway is president of Rutgers University. He was formerly provost at Northwestern University and Dean of Yale College. He specializes in intellectual and social history, with an emphasis on post-emancipation United States history. His books include Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 and Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David

As is always ideally the case, the subtitle for this book encapsulates its contents completely and succinctly: this is a history of the African American experience in the United States, from the beginnings until the present day, and it is done successfully in a short, concise 150 pages. Much of the......more

Goodreads review by James

This is a phenomenally well done, and truly "concise" history of African Americans. Holloway has done a masterful job of conveying a unified narrative, brining both important detail and helpful context, but always in the form of a compelling narrative. In some ways it's not as pointed, and of course......more

A short and comprehensive account of African American history, from the landing of the first blacks in 1600 to the Black Lives Matter movement. A question runs implicitly throughout the text, what does it mean to be an American citizen?......more