woostify domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/latestwordpress/lonestar.a1professionals.net_public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131A review of A Black Women\u2019s History of the United States<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you think you had a pretty accurate picture of United States history\u2014and I thought I did\u2014this book will make you think again. Because like most, I did not know about significant blind spots, gaps, and omissions in what passed for US history before this meticulously researched and entirely accessible history crossed my desk. After reading this compact yet compelling book, I\u2019m a believer: this is an essential, important, and fundamental account that is a must-read for anyone to know the history of the United States in its fullest, truest, and most gut-wrenching reality.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The focus is United States history\u2014really, North American history, from the start\u2014with the added dimension of black womanhood in all the critical and pivotal waypoints in seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century life on the continent. Black women enduring the early years of US history did so against a daily existence of bondage, disenfranchisement, injustice, and inequality, a crucial part of the colonial narrative heretofore largely ignored by historians.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The asymmetrical racial power balance was appalling, the reality of enslavement draconian, and the heartbreaking, unyielding oppression inhumane and soul-crushing. This history restores the historical voice to many courageous, relentless black women who resisted enslavement and colonialism to advocate freedom for their succeeding generations. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The authors chose a unique historical methodology that offers rich detail and layers of research-based narrative, then lets the reader draw conclusions. Rhetorical questions follow the clearly drawn history: How could a black woman feel about herself and her children in the face of rape, murder, denial, oppression, and inhumanity that was the colonial order which persisted for centuries? How would anyone feel\u2014particularly the reader\u2014newly apprised of the atrocity unmentioned or barely spoken of in conventional histories of the United States?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The narrative is heartbreaking mostly, hopeful certainly, and a fitting, long-overdue tribute to the largely nameless, faceless, but powerful and unrelenting black women whose stories leap from the pages of this history. The reader loses the blinders inherent in the typical US history\u2019s narrow account of the inhumanity black women in particular had to bear: their reproductive life was commodified as a saleable labor source by slaveowners. The authors carefully and effectively link this atrocity to another\u2014infanticide\u2014in a way that transcends typical US history and underscores the loss of humanity in a country that tolerated slavery for centuries.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The only troublesome narrative issue I encountered was a question of viewpoint, not history: in chapter three, the historian\u2019s voice is overshadowed by personal bias when the authors intrude in their very well-supported history with a statement regarding enslavement of black people by black people. \u201cThis is a difficult history to report,\u201d the authors state, \u201cas many of those who read it will place blame on black people for contributing to slavery.\u201d This forces the history into the background and foregrounds a misplaced, at least in the historical voice, concern over a desired conclusion they wish to induce. But should historians have a rhetorical agenda? And should that overshadow the history itself at any point? <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n