{"title":"Howard French","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"born-in-blackness-africa-africans-and-the-making-of-the-modern-world-1471-to-the-second-world-war","title":"Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War","description":"\u003cp\u003eTraditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the \"New World.\" Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for \u003cem\u003eBorn in Blackness\u003c\/em\u003e vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the \"dark\" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not--as we are so often told, even today--Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCreating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, \u003cem\u003eBorn in Blackness\u003c\/em\u003e interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, \u003cem\u003eBorn in Blackness\u003c\/em\u003e becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories--siloed and piecemeal--were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic \"rise of the West\" theories that have endured to this day.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Capacious and compelling\" (Laurent Dubois), \u003cem\u003eBorn in Blackness\u003c\/em\u003e is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton--and of the greatest \"commodity\" of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the \"New World,\" whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Liveright Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378472452381,"sku":"9781324092407","price":21.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0988\/1259\/2413\/files\/imageloader_4f48b1ac-f609-4363-a819-06eb6a585de7.jpg?v=1779706393"},{"product_id":"a-continent-for-the-taking-the-tragedy-and-hope-of-africa","title":"A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa","description":"In \u003cb\u003eA Continent for the Taking\u003c\/b\u003e Howard W. French, a veteran correspondent for \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, gives a compelling firsthand account of some of Africa's most devastating recent history-from the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, to Charles Taylor's arrival in Monrovia, to the genocide in Rwanda and the Congo that left millions dead. Blending eyewitness reportage with rich historical insight, French\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003esearches deeply into the causes of today's events, illuminating the debilitating legacy of colonization and the abiding hypocrisy and inhumanity of both Western and African political leaders. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhile he captures the tragedies that have repeatedly befallen Africa's peoples, French also opens our eyes to the immense possibility that lies in Africa's complexity, diversity, and myriad cultural strengths. The culmination of twenty-five years of passionate exploration and understanding, this is a powerful and ultimately hopeful book about a fascinating and misunderstood continent.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378503811357,"sku":"9781400030279","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0988\/1259\/2413\/files\/imageloader_28ab582b-9870-42e8-b9f8-9178f9c6b0aa.jpg?v=1779706417"},{"product_id":"the-second-emancipation-nkrumah-pan-africanism-and-global-blackness-at-high-tide","title":"The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide","description":"\u003cem\u003eThe Second Emancipation\u003c\/em\u003e, the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a \"modern-day Copernicus.\" The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the center of a \"movement of global Blackness,\" with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), at its head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is \"typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa's enormous role in the birth of the modern world.\" Determined to re-create Nkrumah's life as \"an epic twentieth-century story,\" \u003cem\u003eThe Second Emancipation\u003c\/em\u003e begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana's Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French's consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah's early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu--including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him \"one of the greatest political leaders of our century\"--and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana's first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah's radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, \u003cem\u003eThe Second Emancipation\u003c\/em\u003e becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Liveright Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378626461981,"sku":"9781324092452","price":39.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0988\/1259\/2413\/files\/imageloader_b53e300b-16aa-4ed3-8b71-846ff5d3097a.jpg?v=1779706537"}],"url":"https:\/\/revelationsbooks.com\/collections\/howard-french.oembed","provider":"Revelations Books and Treasures LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}