Perspectives on Global African History features accounts and descriptions of important but little known events in Global African history recalled often by those who were witnesses or participants or viewpoints about historical developments shaping the contemporary black world. Many of these accounts will be instant primary sources available to current visitors to BlackPast and to future historians. Each article is accompanied by a brief biography and photo of its author.
Carnegie Mellon University historian Edda L. Fields Black’s 2008 book, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, opened a vast new area of diasporic study by linking the cultivation of rice in Africa to the rise of this crucially important food … Read MoreDeep Roots Across the Atlantic: Rice and Race in Africa and the Americas
In the following account North Carolina State University historian Richard Slatta explores the little known history and heritage of South American cowboys of African and mixed race background. Many students of frontier societies, most notably Frederick Jackson Turner, have depicted the frontier as a place … Read MoreCowboys of Color in South America
In the account below Nova Scotian historian Sharon Robart-Johnson describes the research and writing that culminated in her book, African’s Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Her book, the first history of Afro-Canadians in Nova Scotia, focuses on her community of Greenville, … Read MoreSlavery and Freedom on a Canadian Shore: Africa’s Children in Nova Scotia, 1750-2009
In 2009 W. Mae Kent, published Titanic: The Untold Story, the first historical fiction novel on the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic which makes it’s central character, Nathan Badeau Legarde, a black man. The inspiration for her story came from Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche, an … Read MoreTitanic’s Black Passenger: Creating Historical Fiction From Historical Fact
In the following article historian Omar H. Ali explores a lesser-known aspect of the global African Diaspora, the spread of African peoples and their cultures throughout the Indian Ocean basin. Africans had become a visible part of the Indian Ocean world long before the advent … Read MoreIslam and the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World
In the following article Canadian independent historian Gael Greene examines the arrival of black emigrants from Oklahoma in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. These pioneer settlers carved out communities on one of the last frontiers in North America. Many Canadians feel pride about … Read MoreThe Quest for Land and Freedom on Canada’s Western Prairies: Black Oklahomans in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1905-1912
Most historians of the Roman world have decoupled the concepts of bondage and race that are central to the arguments justifying the enslavement of millions of people in the United States and other modern western nations. Instead they argued that those enslaved by the Romans … Read MoreRoman Slavery and the Question of Race
Vildana Muratovic, a native of Bosnia-Herzegovina and now a citizen of the United States, describes the impact of hip-hop music on the people of the Balkans following her 1997 return to Sarajevo. Her paper was written in 2007. Since its humble beginnings in the 1970s … Read MoreTupac in Sarajevo: The Rise of Rebellion Rap in Eastern Europe
In the nearly half century between 1900 and 1945, various political leaders and intellectuals from Europe, North America, and Africa met six times to discuss colonial control of Africa and develop strategies for eventual African political liberation. In the article that follows, historian Saheed Adejumobi … Read MoreThe Pan-African Congresses, 1900-1945
In March, 1896, Ethiopian forces under the leadership of Emperor Menelik II surprised the world by defeating an Italian Army sent to conquer the Empire. In the following article Raymond Jonas, the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Professor of History at the University of Washington, explores … Read MoreBattle of Adwa (Adowa), 1896
