A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, and: The History of White People (review)

Stephen G. Hall’s A Faithful Account of the Race fills a void in African American historical scholarship—the exclusion of early republic and nineteenth-century African American historians from the historiography of America’s past—while delineating new modes of historical methodology and race formation. The project contributes both to current efforts to expand upon the history of African American historical writing and to theories of racial uplift and identity formation. Hall demonstrates how early republic and nineteenth-century African American thinkers were “troubling the pages of history” in nontraditional ways for far longer than most thought. Reading across a wide range of historical works, from formal historical studies to pamphlets, newspapers, and other nontraditional texts, A Faithful Account of the Race charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from its very beginnings to its professionalization in the twentieth century.

Hall organizes his content chronologically, adhering always to the following three themes. First, he explores African American historiography and its selective appropriation and complex interchange with intellectual constructs from larger Western movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism and Modernism. Second, he locates this historiography in discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counternarratives to mainstream historical discourse. Finally, he considers the influence of the African diaspora, especially as it relates to Haiti and Africa, on the development of African American historical study. Chronologically, Hall begins at the end of the early republic era, explaining several key texts. Most interesting is his rereading of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World as both a history text and a manifesto that “makes a case for the respect owed to black humanity” (38). Then Hall moves to the antebellum period, through Emancipation and the post-Reconstruction “nadir.” Finally, he departs from earlier studies that isolate the growth of race history from the rise of departments of history and closes his book with an exploration of the professionalization of the African American Academy and similar associations, especially the formation of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915. He juxtaposes this development with the formation of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1884 and the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (precursor to the Organization of American Historians) in 1907. Hall states that his dual aim throughout the book is (a) to trace the ways that black intellectuals negotiated and contributed to the construction of a nuanced, expansive, and humanistically grounded historical discourse through the nineteenth century, and (b) to show the relationship of this work to the wider intellectual culture of the time. Constructing “a faithful account of the race,” for both African American historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and for Hall, entails a careful reconstruction of a history that re-created the past, complicated the present, and charted the future condition and possibilities for the race (16). Hall’s historians possess a multifaceted vision: looking to the past to make sense of their present. A Faithful Account of the Race shows African Americans not limiting their concerns to the antique, but also reflecting on and making political claims for their future.

The stakes are high in Hall’s book; reading the terrain of nineteenth-century historical practice as a complex site where African American writers carved out a distinct identity allows us to enlarge the frame of black life beyond the slave trade, the Middle Passage, North American slavery, and general oppression. Nathan Irvin Huggins writes in his classic study Harlem Renaissance (addressing a much-historicized moment in American history) that “it is a rare and intriguing moment when a people decide that they are the instruments of history making and race building. It is common enough to think of oneself as...