Passageways: 1619-1863 v.1

Reflecting late-1990s scholarship on the black past from 1619, this work is both thematic and chronological in its approach. The metaphor "Passageways" describes the paths blacks in America have forged through racially inspired minefields. The text focuses on the ways in which a people imagined and constructed themselves, the institutions they created, the cultures they forged, and the battle for freedom and equality they waged. Volume one addresses the principal developments in the history of peoples of African descent in America, beginning with the arrival of those "twenty and odd" Africans at Jamestown in 1619 to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.