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Conclusion AS A HISTORIAN INTERESTED IN HISTORIOGRAPHY, I constantly look for ways to interject into conversations some discussion of the origins and evolution of African American history as a discipline. Most often, however, conversations of this type occur in class or among colleagues and friends. Despite an outpouring of pathbreaking work in African American history and the common belief that more opportunities to engage African American history exist than ever before, our ideas about the field’s origins, especially textual writing, remain fairly underdeveloped and static. When people are asked what they know about the field’s origins, it is not uncommon for history students, academics , or laypersons to voice some version of the two dominant narratives that continue to inform our perceptions. The first and most obvious narrative , especially at a moment informed by the culture wars, describes African American history emerging as part of the protest culture of the civil rights movement and its turbulent aftermath, the black power movement. Black history is presented as an angry intruder in the midst of a placid (and even staid) academic field marked by order, discipline, and rigor. In this narrative, black history barges onto the field in an undisciplined and chaotic manner and forces recognition from the history establishment. Compared to other areas of scholarly inquiry, its methods are less rigorous, its scope less encompassing, and the important sources are largely confined to the twentieth century, perhaps with the exception of material on slavery. For most people, this history thrives on white guilt and feeds on black anger. The second narrative, although more nuanced than the first, is still largely situated in the twentieth century. In this narrative, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson emerge as the “fathers of black history.” Nothing of substantial scholarly weight preceded their work, so the narrative goes, and everything that came after was profoundly influenced by that work. Although both of these narratives possess kernels of truth, they ultimately leave African American history truncated and blunt any attempts to frame a more holistic and complex portrait of its actual origins and evolution.1 One can only subscribe to these narratives if one refuses to consider the long {228} CONCLUSION history of black historical writing—a history with roots much deeper than the twentieth century. The positioning of African American historians as recognizable professionals by the 1920s was the result of a development that took place over more than a hundred years of historical writing. Because the work of nineteenth-century writers regularly falls outside the pale of “sophisticated” or academically acceptable scholarly writing, we miss the many nuances in early historical writing and begin the discussion of the field’s origin, ironically, just at the point where an important aspect of it—its professionalization—logically ends, namely the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. A number of literary scholars and historians have confronted the challenges presented by the two dominant narratives of African American history, and on the foundation of their pioneering work I have attempted to build a more complete interpretation of the origins and evolution of African American history. The basic intellectual trends that predominate today in African American history and literature, ranging from skillful critiques of American race relations designed to accentuate black humanity, to an engagement with Africa and the wider world, are rooted in the complex realities of the social, political, and economic conditions of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century black writers, as I have shown, were far more sophisticated in their presentations of history than even some scholars who recognize the importance of their work generally acknowledge. Determined to present an accurate and detailed history of their origins, these early black writers created historical narratives that engaged the current conditions of the race—the hard realities that black people faced on a day-to-day basis—and in doing so they also depended upon and deeply reflected nineteenth-century historical forms and ideas circulating in the national and international mainstreams. Borrowing from Puritanism and essentialism, from scientism and objectivity, they demonstrated a high level of intellectual engagement with the large and dynamic world of ideas. Often melding oratorical, rhetorical, and textual forms, black writers looked to history—just as other nineteenth-century writers did—to make sense of the past, explain the present, and predict the future. By doing so, these writers located themselves squarely in the longer trajectory of American historical writing and, perhaps more important...

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