africa history

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, reprint, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 414 pages. An anthropological and historical discourse on the arrival of Christianity in the Southern Tswana region of South Africa. A compelling read and referenced in an in-depth manner. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Volume VI in The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 297 pages, illustrated with maps (one fold-out) and b&w photos. This volume covers the operations of the United States Navy in North African waters, both on the Atlantic coast and in the Mediterranean, from the beginning of World War II through the capture of Pantelleria in June 1943. More than half the volume is devoted to the capture of bases in French Morocco, which was an all-American operation and in many respects one of the most remarkable of the war. Gilt on spine with light fading, lacks dust jacket, otherwise clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Milan, 5 Continents, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 142 pages, b&w photographs taken by Muller. Illustrated boards, no dust jacket issued. A Passage to Congo is a collection of photographs taken by Doctor mile Muller (1891-1976) in the Congo provinces of the Kasa< and Katanga, territories of the Chokwe, Luba, Bashibushong and Basalampasu tribes. For these people, he was not the boss, but he who cured, who gave relief, who listened. He could move easily between the tribes without having to tackle the reticence that has denatured so many ethnic photographs. The privileged witnesses of esoteric ceremonies that are rarely photographed, his images are precious from an ethnographic and historical point of view, and reveal a fine aesthetic sense and profound humanity. Veritable living masks, as in the remarkable portraits of young Chokwe girls, astonishing initiation rites, scenes of divination, wild rhythmic dances responding to the beat of the large slotted drums, sculptural bodies decorated with tattoos and refined headgear recall the beauty and riches of these cultures, now lost in the modern world. 

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 387 pages. Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or "snapshots," highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Softcover. NY, Burns Archive Press, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 272 pages. SIGNED BY STANLEY BURNS on title page. Picturing Freedom chronicles and celebrates the photographic history of African Americans and their cars by focusing on personal images of the pride and joy of car ownership (1900-1980+). Owning a car was a significant life-changing achievement. It offered special freedoms--the freedom to travel, the freedom to work further from home, the freedom to visit family and friends, the freedom to avoid Jim Crow laws, and the freedom to migrate. The car was unequivocal evidence of Black success and an important symbol of status in a country that had long fought their advancement in every area. Car ownership was purposely and proudly photographed. All of the photographs were taken in Black communities by a family member or a friend and reveal how African Americans represented themselves. This 2022 IPPY award-winning compilation of over 450 unique photographs is an inspiring visual narrative of American life. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Washington DC/NY, Infantry Journal and Penguin Books, reprint, 1944, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Paperback, 305 pages. Frontis map. The author became the oldest Junior Subaltern (Second Lieutenant) in the British forces and became known later as the "water bloke" by building an ever-extending pipeline to furnish filtered fresh-water to the British troops pursuing Rommel's army into Tunisia. From the very beginning and especially from the Battle of El Alamein onwards, he traveled the whole 2,000 mile mine-ridden way providing life-sustaining water to the British Eighth Army who spearheaded the allied Tunisian Campaign in a dozen bitter battles that ended in victory on 13 May 1943. The Sappers retired Peter William Rainier as a Major in June 1943 just after the hostilities in Africa had ended. He is remembered as one of the few original members of The Army of the Nile (General Wavell's "thirty thousand") who survived the three long years of fighting allowing him to witness the final victory over the Axis powers in Africa. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. London, Cambridge University Press , 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 500 pages, maps and charts. The papers collected in this volume present important information on the history and culture of contemporary gathering and hunting peoples from Canada, India, Africa, Australia and the Philippines. The volume focuses on two themes: first, on the techniques which band-living foraging peoples employ to organise their social and economic lives; and second, on their fight for the right to their own lands and for a measure of cultural and political autonomy. The contributors maintain that gatherer-hunters are not examples of a disappearing way of life, but peoples who have maintained their social and economic practices through long periods of contact with stratified societies. The aim of this volume it to make known to as wide an audience as possible the daily lives, the patterns of relations between the sexes and the political orientations of the world's contemporary foragers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Macmillan, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in worn dust jacket, 383 pages. fold-out map, bibliographical notes. A seminal study of the infiltration of European influence into West Africa (1860s-90s) from Senegal to Cameroon, the tension between French and English leading to partition.. Light pencil marking throughout. Name on front fly leaf.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 184 pages, coloe illustrations. From before the days of Moses up through the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims bought and sold at the slave markets for millennia, trading the human plunder of wars and slave raids that reached from the Russian steppes to the African jungles. But if the Middle East was one of the last regions to renounce slavery, how do we account for its--and especially Islam's--image of racial harmony? How did these long years of slavery affect racial relations? In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis explores these questions and others, examining the history of slavery in law, social thought, and practice over the last two millennia. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 1923, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, red cloth, 296 pages. Gilt title on spine. Folding maps in rear. Contents: Relation of Bantu to other African races: Africa & Africans - Study of Bantu life & thought: Spirits of things; Spirits of people; Tribal law & politics; Woman & marriage; Training of Bantu youths - Europeanization of Bantu Africa: Discovery of Bantu; White man's burden & how he got it; Some problems of government in Bantu areas; Native labour; Colour bar; Task of Church. Newsp. clippings re author laid in, leaving tan mark.

Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 348 pages. Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of black photographers, is a groundbreaking pictorial collection of African American life. Featuring the work of undisputed masters such as James VanDerZee, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems among dozens of others, this book is a refutation of the gross caricature of black life that many mainstream photographers have manifested by continually emphasizing poverty over family, despair over hope. Nearly 600 images offer rich, moving glimpses of everyday black life, from slavery to the Great Migration to contemporary suburban life, including rare antebellum daguerrotypes, photojournalism of the civil rights era, and multimedia portraits of middle-class families. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Hampton, VA, Hampton Institute Press, 1st, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, dark blue cloth with gilt lettering on front cover and spine, 236 pages plus appendix. A scarce collection of traditional hymns, gospel, folk songs and "Songs of Tribulation" of the American Negro. An historical document of African-American culture and the history of slavery. Songs in musical score with lyrics. A tight, generally unmarked and clean volume with nice cloth and clear gilt, In a poor dust jacket with chipping and tape repairs. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, The New Press , 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover book with a bright dust jacket in a slipcase that also includes interview tapes. A startling first-person history of slavery. Using excerpts from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers' Project, the astonishing audiotapes made available the only known recordings of people who actually experienced enslavement-recordings that had gathered dust in the Library of Congress until they were rendered audible for the first time specifically for this set. Two sixty-minute audiotapes: the first is original recordings of former slaves recorded in the 1930s, the second features dramatic readings by Esther Rolle, James Earl Jones and other black artists. Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The painter, writer, and political activist returns to his native South Africa, where he was once imprisoned for working for the African National Congress, and reflects on the decline of apartheid and his own attachment to the Boer state. He describes the travail of his country riven by racial conflict. He recounts his seven-year imprisonment for treason and shares the passionate love of an exile--he resides in Paris--for his native land. In the recent period of "stability laced with blood" as De Klerk and Mandela's forces struggle to maintain a precarious political equilibrium, Breytenbach has been allowed to return for visits with his Vietnamese wife. Part travelogue and part memoir, this account offers frequent political discussions about the rivalry between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. A careful observer of people, their surroundings, fauna and flora, Breytenbach weaves richly colored narrative history, local lore and personal allusions. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY MILLARD on a tipped-in prlim page. The Rosetta Stone--discovered by French soldiers in 1799, seized by a British envoy, and deciphered 23 years later--set off an obsessive interest in Egypt, including by the newly established Royal Geographical Society, to find the headwaters of the Nile. Bestselling author Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic, offers a tense, vibrant history of several dramatic expeditions across East Africa that finally resulted in a successful discovery. Drawing on archival sources and her own multiple trips to Africa following the explorers' paths, Millard creates a palpable sense of the daunting task undertaken by three ambitious men: the magnetic, impulsive, and often combative Richard Burton; John Hanning Speke, an aristocratic infantry lieutenant and passionate hunter whose initial interest in East Africa was largely for the animals he could kill; and their devoted and resourceful native guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay a former enslaved person whose intimate knowledge of tribes and terrain proved to be indispensable.

Hardcover. London, Hutchinson, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket, 190 pages, 5 b&w illustrations. A true account of the author's adventures as a young man prospecting for gold in Africa, and the region that he believes is the legendary Ophir, famous in Old Testament times for it's fine gold. Name on inside front cover otherwise clean.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization," and the urgency of promoting emigration.Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 455 pages, b&w illustrations. From John Hope Franklin, America's foremost African American historian, comes this groundbreaking analysis of slave resistance and escape. A sweeping panorama of plantation life before the Civil War, this book reveals that slaves frequently rebelled against their masters and ran away from their plantations whenever they could.For generations, important aspects about slave life on the plantations of the American South have remained shrouded. Historians thought, for instance, that slaves were generally pliant and resigned to their roles as human chattel, and that racial violence on the plantation was an aberration. In this precedent setting book, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, significant numbers of slaves did in fact frequently rebel against their masters and struggled to attain their freedom. By surveying a wealth of documents, such as planters' records, petitions to county courts and state legislatures, and local newspapers, this book shows how slaves resisted, when, where, and how they escaped, where they fled to, how long they remained in hiding, and how they survived away from the plantation. Of equal importance, it examines the reactions of the white slaveholding class, revealing how they marshaled considerable effort to prevent runaways,meted out severe punishments, and established patrols to hunt down escaped slaves. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Viking, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 383 pages including glossary, bibliography, and index. "The history of the great African Safaris. It is the story of 150 years of the ultimate adventure, from the first safari in 1836, as Cornwallis Harris walked across the Transvaal with his double-barreled rifle and ox wagon, discovering the hunter's Garden of Eden, to the last of the great professional hunters, as they struggle today to carry on their tradition in the swamps of Tanzania and the high forests of Ethiopia". Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Hanover House, 1st US, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn, chipped dust jacket, 280 pages. " A popular history of the Sahara and the men who have lived and died there to open this wild desert to the world". No markings.

Softcover. NY, Stein and Day, 2nd pr., 1974, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, laminated card wraps, 112 pages, b&w illustrations. Ex-library copy with light stamping and bookplate on inside front cover. On the African influences on blues and jazz.

Hardcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Ellis and Smith provide a unique anthology of African American voices over the past 100 years. In doing so, they give voice to the voiceless with transcribed speeches of leading African American speakers of the twentieth century. Included are 2 80-minute CDs. Includes speeches by: Mary McLeod Bethune,Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, Shirley Chisholm, Louis Farrakhan, Marcus Garvey, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Booker T. Washington, Walter White, others, Clean copy.

Hardcover. Montclair NJ, Allanheld, Osmun, 1st US, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 266 pages. Illustrated with maps and tables, this study describes and analyse the social and ecological destruction of the 1968-78 Sahel drought and famine, during which more than 100,000 W. Africans died of starvation and hunger related diseases, and livestock herds and agricultural production were critically reduced. It traces the history of this disaster to the impact of French colonial government policy on the fragile ecology of the region and the effects of food and export regulations on agriculture and on the social structure and interrelationships of the tribes. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, Reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 236 pages. Softcover. Binding tight. Some underlining in pencil on a few pages, otherwise clean inside. A touch of foxing to top edge. Wrapper in great shape. Looks great.