African American National Biography by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (review)

Book Reviews Henry Louis Gates,Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. African American National Biography.New York: Oxford University Press,2008. 5,568 pp. 8 vols. ISBN: 9780195160192 ( cloth), 995.00. A step into most American university research libraries today and a search for a single or a multivolume published collection on the lives and accomplishments of African Americans would reveal a plethora of outstanding sources only in the past dozen years. One of the most recent, and perhaps the best, of this genre is under review here. Coedited by two of the most prominent and highly accl·aimed scholars of the black American experience, Henry Lewis Gates, Jr.,and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, this impressive and semiti: 71 series, a product of the African American National Biography Project and sponsored by Harvard University's W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press, sets a new standard for all other similar volumes to follow. More specifically, this publication, built on the most recent African American scholarship , and utilizing the current methodological advances in the fields of African American history and studies, is the largest and most complete such biographical dictionary project to date. In the introductory essay of the African American National Biography AANB), the history and scope of this series is revealed quickly. In general, the editors contend that their initial intent was simply to update and supplement the critically acclaimed Dictionary ofAmerican Negro Biography 1982) and American National Biography 1999).After painstakinglv selecting six hundred of the more than four thousand submitted entries to place in their earlier, onevolume African American Lives 2004), both scholars agreed on the need for a distinctive and separate multivolume published series. In it, Gates and Higginbotham for the first time tell the stories of various Afric· an American women and men, both famous and obscure,whose " contributions marked and were confined to their place and time but]transcended their pl·ace and time" XXXV). The fort»n·at of the collection is alphabetical ,with the length of entries varying from a halfpage to several pages based on the perceived importance of an individual as well as the avail·ability of the sources. In addition, of the approximately 4,100 individuals included in this multivolume series, most of them originated from an enormous database of more than 12,500 African American names housed at the Barker Center on the campus of Harvard University. To capture a wide range of African American historical topics, especially during the period after World War II, the editors assembled an excellent staff whose expertise included the fields of art, business, education, labor, music, politics, science, sports, technology. The volumes also explore the role African Americans played during the age of exploration FALL 2008 73 BOOK REVIEWS and the settlement of the West. Nearly John R.Dichtl.Frontiers of Faith: onefourth of the entries of this collection discuss the experiences of African American women. After reviewing only the first few entries, the reader obtains a clear understanding ofthe massive detail and scope of the entire collection. For instance, while the second entry highlights the important career of baseball great Henry " Hank" Aaron, the third article details the life of Jesse Aaron, a littleknown woodcarver who became a folk artist later in his life. For those scholars and nonschol ars interested in local or regional African American history, this collection does not disappoint. Such entries vary from fugitive slaves such as Henry W. Bibb, William Wells Brown, Margaret Garner, and John R Parker, to the journalist and political activist Wendell P. Dabney, to civil rights leaders and politicians Peter H. Clark and John Mercer Langston, to the honorable Judge N·athaniel R. Jones. African American National Biography is a remarkable and powerful collection that illuminates the lives of both wellknown and vaguely recognizable black Americans from various periods and from all walks of life. For this alone, the coeditors and their editorial staff should be commended. Despite such high praise,one wonders why entries on local trailblazers such as Marion Spencer and William " Bill"Mallory were omitted. Perhaps these individuals, like many overlooked African Americans, can be added to the planned online version . In the...