The fourth publication in the award-winning, critically acclaimed Milestone Documents series, Milestone Documents in African American History explores the fundamental primary sources in African American history. This four-volume set covers 135 iconic primary documents from the 1600's to the present.

Each entry offers the full text of the document in question as well as an in-depth, analytical essay that places the document in its historical context.
One hundred and twenty-five speeches, documents, and chapters or passages from longer works are fully analyzed in this collection of selected primary sources. Coverage includes John Rolfe's casual mention in correspondence of “20 and odd Negroes” delivered as indentured servants in 1619; President Obama's address to the 2009 NAACP Centennial Convention; the “Ohio Black Code”; the wrenching Confessions of Nat Turner from the 1831 pamphlet authored by Thomas Ruffin Gray; Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I Have A Dream” address; and Clarence Thomas's acid “concurrence/dissent” in the Grutter v. Bollinger case. In each of the chronologically ordered entries, the document's text is preceded by a clear explanation of its significance, a context-placing essay, a biography of its author, a time line, a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis, a discussion of its audience and impact, one or more contemporary black-and-white illustrations, a multimedia resource list, and several study questions. References readers may be unfamiliar with and foreign words and phrases are outlined in glossaries following the texts. Back matter in volume 4 includes teacher activity guides keyed to national history standards. The set's full text is available online (through the end of 2011) in the “Salem History” database. As a print resource for upper-level students, this work substantially trumps Kai Wright's single-volume The African American Experience (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2009) as a primary-source supplement to Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates's Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (Oxford, 2005).

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