Life Upon These Shores — Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 — By Henry Louis Gates Jr. — Book Review - NYTimes.com: ...Through dozens of profiles and other short essays, accompanied by abundant and beautifully reproduced prints, paintings, newspaper clippings and photographs, Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, tries to summarize the black experience in North America, from the arrival of the free black conquistador Juan Garrido with Ponce de Leon in 1513 to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Though there are inevitable gaps (there’s one scant reference to Billie Holiday, for instance, and her name is misspelled), most of the major figures are here, from politics, religion, scholarship, entertainment, sports. It is an appropriately eclectic group, ranging from leaders of slave rebellions like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner to Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. Most are familiar, at least to semi-serious students of black history, but some are undeservedly obscure, like Cotton Mather’s slave Onesimus, who taught Mather how to inoculate the Massachusetts Bay Colony against smallpox.
