Writers & Books

Paradigm shifts in historiography seem to come all at once rather than being spaced evenly along the disciplinary trajectory. The last such shift in writing about slavery and race (including civil rights) in the United States came between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. It looks now as though we are in the midst of another re-casting of the framework of assumptions and vocabulary of concepts that US historians bring to the study of these critical topics. Add to that the fact that Colson Whitehead’s novel, Underground Railroad (2016), won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, while several recent Oscar nominees for 2017 were films – Moonlight, Fences, Hidden Figures, and Loving – that explored various dimensions of the African-American experience over the last half-century. In fact, the book under review here, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, won the 2016 National Book Award in Nonfiction.