Children of Fire: A History of African Americans

Holt (Black over White), professor of American and African-American history at the University of Chicago, constructs an interlocking historical chain of the lives of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), Richard Allen (1761–1831), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), whose trajectories reveal a more complex history of African-Americans than the one that simply moves in a linear fashion from slavery to the civil rights movement. Holt connects these men through their corresponding but still unique lives; for example, Equiano, Allen, and Douglass had been slaves, but in different times and places, and in different global contexts. Though moored by these extraordinary figures, Holt's history, replete with vignettes of the lesser known, is inspired by a sense "that ordinary people don't live history as it is taught by historians." A work of historiography as well as history, this book provides a fluid synthesis of the growing body of research in African-American history and letters as well as a thoughtful reconsideration of the work of previous historians. Provocative and bound to spur debate, Holt's study is readable, passionate, and partisan at moments, but balanced, resting upon rigorous scholarship. (Oct.)