Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

by Ibram X. Kendi (Editor)

Other authorsKeisha N. Blain (Editor)

Hardcover, 2021

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

Edwin Mitoma Collection

Publication

One World (2021), Edition: 1st Edition, 528 pages

Description

"A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 80 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Last year marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first African presence in the Americas--and also launched the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracism Institute of American University, and Keisha Blain, editor of The North Star. They've gathered together eighty black writers from all disciplines -- historians and artists, journalists and novelists--each of whom has contributed an entry about one five-year period to create a dynamic multivoiced single-volume history of black people in America"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Hccpsk

With Four Hundred Souls, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain have set the standard for a historical survey of Blacks in America. They have taken the 400 years from 1619 to 2019 and separated them into five-year spans, then bestowed each segment to a writer to do as they please in two to five pages.

There are personal essays, biographies, fiction, as well as straight historical writings. Offerings come from Black elites including Nikole Hannah-Jones, Clint Smith, Donna Brazile, Isabel Wilkerson, Angela Davis and so many more. If that’s not enough to entice readers, every 40-year segment is capped with a poem by other renowned writers like Ishamel Reed and Mahogany L. Brown. This is a book to devour or to savor in small doses over and over again--to refer back to throughout a lifetime. I cannot imagine a US History teacher who would not want this on a syllabus as not only a record of history but as a collection of incredible mentor texts for students to see the various ways to examine the past. Not only a must-read but a must-own for everyone.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an ARC of this book.

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LibraryThing member Salsabrarian

At first glance, it's a bit overwhelming. But it is fairly approachable once you start. The "community-written" history covering 400 years of African-American history is a collection of short (3-5 pages) chronological essays describing key events and people well-known and not so much. Not a

comprehensive history but it does what I believe it sets out to do: share less-known stories and history and the humanity behind them.

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LibraryThing member LibroLindsay

I loved the scope of this and how it builds upon itself to bring the reader to the present. One book will never be sufficient to tell such a broad history, but this volume does an admirable job telling significant parts of it. I was particularly excited to listen to the audio for the dozens of

people selected to read. The only drawback was inherent to its format--being that it had so many authors, I was drawn to some essays more than others, and in that it felt a little uneven. But overall, it really is a tremendous read and provides fodder for further exploration.

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LibraryThing member jmchshannon

Four Hundred Souls by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Baine is one of those books that is so difficult to describe. On the surface, it is nothing more than a collection of short stories and poems that tell the tale of Black Americans since the first enslaved African was brought to our shores. However,

there is nothing superficial about this collection. Some essays provide new-to-me information about certain points in history, but all provide history from a very different point of view than the one commonly taught in history classes. Haunting and yet utterly fascinating, the pain of the last four hundred years permeates every essay and poem. Yet, all of them include a fierce pride at everything they have collectively overcome as well as an unbreakable will that shows how Blacks continue to thrive no matter what white people do to them.

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LibraryThing member Poprockz

Very interesting and informative.

LibraryThing member larryerick

There will be people who are going to be disappointed in how low I rate this book. Perhaps it is justified. This collection of essays and poems has a lot going for it: it covers a lot of ground historically in the black experience in America (400 years), the prose is uniformly well done (I'm not

qualified to rate the limited amount of poetry), and it has a variety of approaches to the topic at hand. On the other hand, it is not always faithful to the 5 year chunks of American history that each essay represents, and the depth of focus in each essay is quite variable. Some authors clearly tried to draw out historical context for their assigned time period. Others barely wrote about persons or events for the assigned periods, but waxed philosophically about wide concepts that could have applied to much wider issues and time periods. Ultimately, it reminded me of going to a conference on a particular topic: medical, technological, educational, artistic, etc., where the conference attendees get to choose from a variety of speakers, many of whose lectures or panels do not relate to each other than in the broadest scope of the conference theme. I have read dozens of books now on the black experience in America, and this is like cocktail party hors d'oeuvres. It is not a comprehensive, consistent coverage of 400 years in Black America. Ibram X. Kendi's own book, Stamped From the Beginning, would be a better choice, but even that impressive work really only covers a certain aspect of what Black America has experienced. Will this book provide a starting point to introduce the less informed to an important subject? I think that depends on the person. For every person who finds the kindling in this book to build a fire to read much more extensively, I'm afraid there will be an equal number who will conclude they have read quite enough on the subject and never read much more. To me that would be a pity. There are several important, impressive, worthwhile works out there.

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LibraryThing member JimandMary69

Editors look at work by 90 different writers take on brief periods of history

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