To study African American history is to study America itself, for Africans and people of African descent began settling that continent nearly a century before the English. Despite their early New World presence, African Americans have spent centuries suspended between being black and being American, a state of mind W. E. B. Dubois called "double consciousness." This module will place Dubois's famous formulation in historical perspective, beginning with the colonial period and moving up to the recent past.
The first half of the module examines the history of slavery, free black communities, black abolitionism and political activism, the Civil War, emancipation and Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow. The second half of this module focuses on the African American experience in the twentieth century, including African American reform movements, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression and World War Two, the long Civil Rights Movement, African-American Consumer Culture and Popular Culture.