African American Studies

[Name of the Institute]

African American Studies

Introduction

Afro-Americans historiography, with its own conceptual and methodological concerns, is now poised to illuminate the Afro-American past in a manner that will broaden and deepen our knowledge of black people in the country. The history of Afro-Americans is no longer undertaken principally to revise the work of wrongheaded white historians, to discern divine providence. In order to show black participation in the nation's growth and development, to prove the inevitability of black equality, or to demonstrate the inexorable progress made by Afro-Americans. It is conducted as a distinct area of inquiry, within the discipline of history, with black people as its primary focus to reveal their thought and activities over time and place (Rucker, 2010). This paper is based on the study of African American history, their culture, religion, believes, values, tradition, social, political, economic conditions and their development over the years. In this paper I will consider “To Make Our World Anew: Volume I: A History of African Americans to 1880”, by Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis. The paper will be divided into two sections, including; the progression of African American in the West during 1800, as discussed by the author in their book and discuss the causes of Atlantic Slave Trade, with its significance to the modern American history.

Question # 1

The people referred today as African Americans were neither African nor American in the colonies. They had been involuntarily captured and transported from Africa to colonies throughout the Western Hemisphere for purposes of enslavement, or they were descended from those people. Although among the oldest American-born populations, they tragically no longer had a legitimate home.

Although black family income is less than two-thirds that of whites, it has been responsible for sustaining a wide range of viable black institutions, including churches and schools, fraternal organizations, insurance firms, and various media enterprises. Along with black-owned businesses, black religious institutions are the most influential among African Americans. African Americans are overwhelmingly Protestant Christians and, as black bureaucratic organizations, the Baptist and Methodist churches are the largest and most significant. African-American men and women in the antebellum United States shared everyday experiences in their struggle for freedom. Despite disparate lives created by regional differences, labor patterns, religious beliefs, and legal sanctions, enslaved and democratic people alike fought an unending battle to define and possess their individual liberty. Freedom was not simply the opposite of slavery, nor did slavery mean the absolute absence of freedom. Liberty was experienced across a spectrum and won by deliberate and deliberate action (Kelley, Lewis, 2005).

In the years following the Civil War, serious adjustment problems gripped the South, where both races faced different situations. For African Americans, freedom was an experience to be tasted and tested; for Southern whites, black freedom was a challenge to be circumscribed and, where possible, checked. By 1870, congressional Reconstruction was in full swing. The former Confederate states were required to write new constitutions, some of which funded public schools, railroad construction, and other public ...