| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth Rauh Bethel. The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities. New York: St. Martin's. 1997. Pp. xiii, 242.

This book, which examines the thought of northern free blacks between the American Revolution and 1860, is a collection of essays with some chronological structure. For that Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, a sociologist, begs historians' indulgence. She seeks "to write about race and to explore the construction of a politicized racial identity . . . [about] ways in which a relatively small population of free African Americans living in the antebellum North reformulated their collective past and . . . perceived, understood, acted upon, and remembered past events." Bethel asserts that "a fundamentally marginalized people crafted a uniquely New World ethnic identity that informed popular African-American historical consciousness" (p. vii). In a ten-line sentence on her first page, she gives the reader an ominous sense of the prose to come. Collective efforts to claim the American dream were forged before 1860, informing the national conventions of the 1830s and migrations to Haiti, Canada, and Africa, and shaping Reconstruction, pan-Africanism, and the 1960s civil rights movement. . . .

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