Book Review

Canada and the United States

It is always odd to read a collection of essays from cover to cover, since we more often read selectively from such volumes in accordance with particular research and teaching goals. But only a start-to-finish engagement with this book can make clear just how creative an assembling of scholarship it is. Editors Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins have gathered essays from nearly three decades of scholarship (all of the pieces are reprints) for the purpose of illuminating a field of study only very recently defined. This means that some of the older essays do not offer explicit gendered analysis; in others, authors write about, for example, "slaves," without specifying gender. Yet that is precisely the value of the collection: that the authors have sought out pioneering work about the historical experiences of African-American men, some of which dates from a time in which the analytical categories of "manhood" and "masculinity" were not recognized. In light of recent strides in the field, those well-versed in the literature will be able to glean the gendered analyses therein, especially given the inclusion of many recently produced essays that do explicitly treat gender and masculinity as historical constructs. Moreover, the editors' introduction serves as a useful guide, offering lengthy interpretations of each essay in relation to the history of gender. (Because the editors rehearse considerable detail from each article, some readers may find it more useful to read the articles themselves first.) In the final pages of the introduction, Hine and Jenkins pose their central inquiries: "How do we determine how black men construct manhood and express masculinity? And, what social, economic, political, and cultural forces have helped shape black male identity, and what has been the male-gendered response of black men to historical events and change?" (pp. 56–57). The introduction also offers textbook-like background that will be useful to undergraduates and beginning graduate students.	1
A life, a community, a town, a rebellion, a craft, a regiment: these are some of the paths—not always well-lit by surviving documents—that historians might take in an effort to recreate the experiences of African-American men from the earliest days of enslavement through the Civil War and emancipation. The contributors to this collection have walked these paths and more. From cover to cover, in fact, the volume serves beautifully to teach not only history but also methodology. The multilayered language of slave narratives; the clues yielded in Spanish colonial records and physical artifacts; the inversion of voices in sources generated by white people (whether a biography or a business ledger); the intense and exhaustive combing of censuses, tax lists, crew lists, inventories, newspapers, court records, and military records: in all of these can be found invaluable lessons in rigorous and creative research. Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, for example, trace the participation of black men in the Revolutionary War through the presence of black figures in paintings of white heroes, as well as by tracking down obscure obituaries and memorials, songs and ballads, and literally fading scraps of paper. To give another example, Emma Jones Lapsansky's attention to the historical consciousness of the black men who meticulously kept the records of Philadelphia's elite Banneker Institute lights otherwise dim paths of inquiry into class divisions within urban black communities.	2
By arranging the essays both chronologically and thematically, Hine and Jenkins lend the volume a notable coherence. The life of a West African prince who purchased his own freedom in eighteenth-century New England prompts Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., to draw an intriguing portrait of a dynamic and self-fashioned identity that is at once African and American. A free black town in colonial Spanish Florida, Jane Landers finds, illuminates the formation of an African-Hispanic identity that is also intertwined with American Indian and British cultures. The Stono Rebellion in colonial South Carolina comes under the scrutiny of John K. Thornton, who uncovers the rebels' African heritage in their Kongolese military tactics.	. . .