Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy: A Reader

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University of Illinois Press, 2010 - History - 296 pages

This reader collects fourteen influential essays by Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) on the African American experience. Written with passion and eloquence, they are full of ideas originally dismissed by a white, segregated academy that have now become part of the scholarly mainstream. Covering topics including slave resistance, black abolitionists, Reconstruction, and W. E. B. Du Bois, these essays demonstrate the critical connection between political commitment and the advancement of scholarship, while restoring Aptheker's central place as one of the founding scholars in the development of African American studies.

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About the author (2010)

Eric Foner is the preeminent historian of his generation. His books have won the top awards in the profession, and he has been president of both major history organizations, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. He is the author of Give Me Liberty!, which displays all of his trademark strengths as a scholar, teacher, and writer. A specialist on the Civil War/Reconstruction period, he regularly teaches the nineteenth-century survey at Columbia University, where he is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History. In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize. His Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad is a 2015 New York Times bestseller.