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The year of 1980 marked a pivotal turning point in the American political landscape: the electoral victory of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan; the beginnings of the public hysteria and eventual legislative dismantling of affirmative action and other civil rights initiatives; the dawn of the ruthless reign of neo-conservatism; and, in some ways serving as the glue, the ascent of neo-liberalism as the prevailing ideology and standard logic of viewing and ordering the world. Some thirty-five years later, it is almost difficult to remember a world, and more precisely a moment in United States history, when these things were not so dominant. When thinking about the lasting impact of that moment, David Harvey writes, "Future historians may well look upon the years 1978-1980 as a revolutionary turning-point in the world's social and economic history... revolutionary impulses seemingly spread and reverberated to remake the world around us in a totally different image." In short, this was an instance of profound transformation; it was the dawn of the counterrevolution. By no means immune to the changes in the larger political landscape, Black activists and intellectuals also felt the ground moving beneath their feet in 1980, as many would gradually shift from an all out advance towards liberation to a posture concerned with what James Turner described as "the preservation of the modest gains made by African Americans over the last decade." The previous decade witnessed an obvious waning in the Black liberation movement, a slew of high-profile manhunts, arrests, court cases and outright criminalizing of radical activists, the unearthing of Cointelpro, the blooming of the liberation movement in Southern Africa, a taxing debate around various articulations of Marxism and Black nationalism, the full swing of feminism, and a full decade of Africana Studies, which also meant institutionalized space to foster such discussions. It was these changing times that provided the context for the important gathering of Black activists and intellectuals in Ithaca, New York, during September 1980 at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell, and the content for this book. Bound together by the dual purposes of both assessing the road traveled and preparing for the journey ahead, the ensemble in attendance gathered to ponder, "the Next Decade"-as the conference theme spelled out plainly. A quick glance at the conference's list of attendees demonstrates the extraordinary sphere of activity that was the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell. Participants and attendees at this historic meeting included Toni Cade Bambara, Lerone Bennett, Johnella Butler, John Henrik Clarke, Gayla Cook, Louis Farrakhan, Hoyt Fuller, Ewart Guinier, Vincent Harding, Robert Harris, Stephen Henderson, Robert Johnson, George Kent, George Lamming, Tilden Lemelle, Bernard Magubane, Manning Marable, William Nelson, William Sales, Michael Thelwell, Bettye Collier-Thomas, Eleanor Traylor, Ivan Van Sertima, Ronald Walters, Shirley Weber, Sylvia Wynter, Howard Dodson, William Strickland, and two of the visual artists featured in this book, David Bradford and Bertrand Phillips. This book is both a contribution to the historiography of the Black/African Studies movement and an intellectual treasure, representing the ideas and visions of many of the best minds at a crucial juncture in the African world.

Black Folk Here and There is a seminal work that attempts to combine anthropology and comparative history in a study of the Black Experience from the beginning of literate cultures to the advent of the transatlantic slave trade and the White Racism that quickly developed as its ideological support. In this volume, the Black experience is conveyed through the Judaic, Greek and Roman cultures to European Christendom and the Muslim World in the period before the great diasporafrom Africa to the West began in the sixteenth century CE.

This is the first complete English translation of Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer's sensitive account of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in the mid-eighteenth century. A vital resource on the history of West Africa, Rømer's work offers rich descriptions of African societies, trading practices with Europe, and religion. Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer was employed in West Africa from 1739 to 1749 by the Danish West India and Guinea Company. He published two books about the Gold Coast, a short one in 1756, and then his more substantial A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea in 1760. Rømer deals with the operation of the various European trading companies, and discusses the African-European relations that he had witnessed. But the real value of his work lies in his descriptions of the local context-the African traders and customers, their societies, practices and religion. And he was much interested in African history, particularly from oral traditions.This edition (principally of Rømer's 1760 text, but drawing on his 1756 volume too) makes available an uncommon source for the history of West Africa. This edition of Rømer's volume was runner-up for the African Studies Association's Texts Prize, 2001.

The present volume is quite different from the other two autobiographies by W. E. B. Du Bois not only because of its additional two-decade span, and the significantly altered outlook of its author, but also because in it-unlike the others-he seeks, as he writes, "to review my life as frankly and fully as I can." This is an indispensable volume.

Carter G. Woodson's classic text on the emergence of African American churches, chronicling their story out of the eighteenth-century evangelical revivals and their transformations through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is important for reasons other than "black church" history. With the exception of recent books, such as C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's "The Black Church in the African-American Experience," Woodson's text remains one of the best overviews of the topic. But Woodson's text is also a significant account of the ways in which Christian-based instruction and socialization shaped not only class divisions and vetted leadership among, but also shaped who/what became the "Negro/Colored/Black/African American." For even the "Father of Black History," as Woodson is often called, could not escape the spell casted by the prevailing Christian ideology of his time, and in the earlier periods he investigated. In fact, Woodson viewed "Christianity [as] a rather difficult religion for [the] undeveloped mind [of the enslaved African] to grasp," and never questioned this Christianity or probed the African basis of rituals and ideas among the enslaved and the emancipated. Instead, Woodson extols the virtues of Christianity among the converted, and the men who established the various churches in African descended communities, including the educative, social, economic, and political roles played by these institutions after the U. S. Civil War. There is little here about those who adhered to spiritual or religious practices and ideas that remained as close to Africa as possible.For Woodson, then, the ministry was one of the highest callings and occupations to which African American male leaders could aspire, and from which they accrued prominence within their communities at a time when religious instruction was the primary schooling option available. These "educated Negroes," as Woodson called them, were now armed with the Christian religion, Christian names, and a dream to partner (in an inferior position) with the dominant values and views of white society, which all created sectarianism and, eventually, two divergent visions among African descended peoples in North America. Nineteenth century converts split along "class" lines, and urbanized elites developed a Christian distaste for their kinfolk who continued to engage in African-based rituals and practices, such as the ring shout. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, these elites began to seek equal rights and full acceptance by whites-thus the need to distance themselves from things "African" and despite the fact that a few church organizations kept the term "African" as part of their name. The majority of the African-based community saw racism and its insidiousness as deeply rooted in their fight for human rights, while the elites viewed slavery and discrimination as obstacles which prevented "their" particular progress rather than a collective advancement. Since Woodson, writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, had access to individuals who were either enslaved or children of the enslaved, his account is still therefore relevant as both a source and as a story that captures some of the foregoing processes in African and African American history.