February is set aside as African-American History Month and, with that occasion in mind, the Middlesboro campus library recently purchased some new book acquisitions on that subject. The titles are as follows:
Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, 344 pgs., Princeton University Press, by C.S. Manegold (December, 2009). The author centers her study of slavery in the North on Ten Hills Farm, an estate north of Boston, passed down through five generations of powerful slave-owning dynasties. The author conveys a lively depiction of New England social, cultural and political history, and his thoughtfully researched and eminently readable book will allow no one to remain unaware of the North’s extensive links to slavery and the slave trade.
The Making of African America, by Ira Berlin, 320 pages, V
iking Adult (January 2010). Berlin offers a fresh reading of American history through the prism of the great migrations that made and remade African-American life. The first was the forcible deportation of Africans to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, followed by their forced transfer into the American interior during the 19th century. Then came the migration of the mid-20th century as African-Americans fled the South for the urban North, and the arrival of continental Africans and people of African descent from the Caribbean during the latter part of the 20th century.
How Free is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow, by Leon F. Litwack, 208 pgs., Harvard University Press (February, 2009). In this examination of African-American life after slavery, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Litwack recounts the physical brutality and crushing legal oppression of Jim Crow America. Drawing on African-American literature, poetry and blues music, as well as archival and media records, the author details lynchings, segregation, denial of education and housing—and the dedication among African-Americans determined not to be treated as second-class citizens.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, 384 pgs, Crown Publishers (February 2010). From a single, short life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive–even thrive–in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs. Meanwhile, Henrietta’s family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution–and her cells’ strange survival–left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion.
Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African-American Women and Religion by Bettye Collier-Thomas, 736 pgs, Knopf Publishers (February, 2010). Collier-Thomas allows the strong voices of women as diverse as Ida B. Wells Barnett, Sarah Jane Woodson Early (the first black woman to serve on a faculty of an American university), and Mary McLeod Bethune to articulate the causes of liberation and justice. Collier-Thomas demonstrates the ways black women have woven their faith into their daily experience and played central roles in developing African-American religion, politics, and public culture.
