The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations

328 Pages·2010·23.131 MB·English

by  Ira Berlin

IAKING OF
AFRICAN AMERICA
THE FOUR GREAT MIGRATIONS
AUTHOR OF MANY THOUSANDS GONE
U.S. $27 95 I C anada $35.00
FOUR GREAT MIGRATIONS
frame the history of people of African descent in
America, setting the paths by which Africans and
then African Americans made and remade black
life between the seventeenth and twenty-first
centuries. Those four massive upheavals form the
foundation of Ira Berlin's sweeping new inter-
pretation oft he African American experience.
First came the Middle Passage, the forcible and
violent removal of some four hundred thou-
sand men and women from the west coast of
Africa to mainland North America during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The sec-
ond great migration— over twice the size of the
first— saw the deportation of one million Afri-
can Americans from the Atlantic seaboard to the
southern interior of the United States in the first
half of the nineteenth century. In the third, six
million African Americans fled the rural South
to the urban North during the middle decades of
the twentieth century. Finally, at the end of the
twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first
centuries, people of African descent arrived in
the United States from Africa, the Caribbean,
South America, and Europe, again changing the
composition, character, and culture of the Afri-
can American population of the United States.
Tracing the transit from Africa to America, Vir-
ginia to A labama, Biloxi to Chicago, Lagos to the
Bronx, one of the nation's most distinguished
historians challenges the traditional presenta-
tion of a l inear, progressive development of black
America. Instead, he poses a new idea: a con-
trapuntal dynamic of movement and place, one
that sees eras of great movement alternating with
deep rootedness. The Making of A frican America
speaks of the old giving way to the new, innova-
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The Making of African America

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Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their
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