Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Although free northern blacks, even in antebellum times, had written popular historical works detailing the contributions of Africans – in their homelands and in the Diaspora – to world civilization, prominent Euro-American scholars continued early into the twentieth century to paint the African race as innately inferior and as a beneficiary of, rather than a contributor to, the development of civilization in the West and in the World. Prominent among the historians who took this view were Albert Bushnell Hart and U. B. Phillips. Racist historiography persisted even after trained black historians like George Washington Williams, William Wells Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson emerged to provide scientific studies of African and African American achievements. With the exception of Du Bois, who provided an early Marxian interpretation of Black Reconstruction, all of the black scholars continued in the Contributionist mode of the early popular African American historians. By 1920, Woodson, as a founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and founder and editor of the Journal of Negro History , had taken the lead in writing and publishing scholarly works on black life and history. By the time of the Second World War, a few white scholars, primarily Jewish and Leftist ones, had begun to contribute major works on African and African American history. ... log in or subscribe to read full text