Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present

"Nell Painter is an incredibly prolific and influential scholar—and she knows how to craft a really compelling narrative history. Her prose is always clean. This book gives you the broad picture of the history of a people in context. She looks at laws, events, and economics; she also is sensitive to cultural milestones and political organizing. When she writes about the racial politics of military during World War II, it’s rooted in what’s going on nationally and internationally. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s a handful of books where you could say, if you want to know the story of black Americans, here you go. Her book is amongst the most meticulous. It’s hard to breathe life into narrative survey history; she does. She gives details, she draws you in, and she sends you off in other directions, with suggestions of other books that you should read. It’s hard to think of myself as being central. I do think of myself as being part of a community of people who are seriously and creatively trying to take up the responsibility of filling in gaps in the American story and helping America understand how we got from then to now. “Historians are always asking what parts of the past we need in order to imagine our future” I like to think about the map as a metaphor. If you put every detail on a map, it wouldn’t be a usable instrument for navigation. For the map to be usable, cartographers must make choices about what parts of a map are necessary and what relationships they must show. Similarly, historians are always asking what parts of the past we need in order to imagine our future. African American historians are particularly focused on rethinking what we need to understand about our past. How do we build archives of information to help us make history useful? One of the things that I like about emergent scholars is that their work is less bound by specialization. They have methodological training and rigor, but they move across disciplines and subject areas and types of research and types of writing. So I don’t think we’re “doing everything,” but we’re doing a lot of different things; we’re mixing methods. We’re inspired by people like Nell to see intellectual life as not just a scholarly endeavor, but a creative enterprise."