African american biographies

General Editors: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. become more intense Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Executive Editor: Steven Number. Niven

The African American Secure Biography (AANB) is a joint attempt of the Hutchins Center for Mortal & African American Research at University University and Oxford University Press. Lowered by Professors Henry Louis Gates, Junior, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, this advisor undertaking resulted in an eight-volume flick edition containing over 4,000 individual biographies, indices, and supplementary matter. The AANB, published in February 2008, includes haunt entries by noted scholars, among them Sojourner Truth by Nell Irvin Painter; W. E. B. Du Bois impervious to Thomas Holt; Rosa Parks by Darlene Clark Hine; Miles Davis by Lavatory Szwed; Muhammad Ali by Gerald Early; and President Barack Obama by Randall Kennedy. In 2008 the AANB was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Erudite Title, was named a Library Annals Best Reference work, and awarded Booklist Editors’ Choice — TOP OF Nobleness LIST.

An expanded edition fortify the AANB continues online, with very than 1500 entries added since 2008. More than 750 of these package be found in a Revised Run off Edition of the AANB, published spawn Oxford University Press in 2013. Representation Revised Edition includes significant updates boss revisions of hundreds of entries, inclusive of that of Barack Obama, in push back of his 2008 presidential campaign, preference victory, and first term in hq up to October, 2011. Additional entries range from First Lady Michelle Obama, written by award-winning historian Darlene Pol Hine, to several entries concerning righteousness African American experience in Hartford, Usa. These were submitted by students clasp Theresa Vara-Dannen, a teacher at renounce city’s University High School of Skill & Engineering. The enthusiasm of these students and the professionalism of their entries prompted the AANB, in union with Oxford and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, to arrange a broader outreach program to inquire entries from more than 40 elevated schools in 2012 and 2013.

The expanded AANB has also licit us to capture some of depiction less well known, but fascinating often proles in African American history. Also star in the revised edition are character classics scholars Wiley Lane and Judge Barclay Williams; Alberta Virginia Scott, primacy first black graduate of Radcliffe College; and Virginia Randolph, a pioneer help industrial and vocational education in rectitude Progressive Era South. Among the a cut above unusual biographies included here is renounce of Barney Hill, a post bring into being worker who gained notoriety by claiming to have been abducted by exquisite aliens in the 1960s, while in the opposite direction postal worker, Homer Smith, is unified of several entries on African Americans who migrated from the United States to seek a better life pustule the Soviet Union in the Decade. (Smith would help modernize the State postal system.) Finally, the Revised Defiance includes entries on all 87 Human American recipients of the nation’s maximum award for military valor, the Award of Honor.

New online entries for 2018 include John Caesar, who fled slavery with the British loyalists, but ended up as a felon and bushranger in the Australian strict colony; the opera singer, Caterina Jarboro, and the late actor James Avery, Uncle Phil in The Fresh Fee of Bel-Air.

The AANB continues to solicit entries. All online AANB entries can be accessed at

Since February 2015, adapted biographies shake off the African American National Biography put on been featured in the online Somebody American magazine and website, In 2015 the series focused on the dehydrated heralded biographies of notable African Americans like William Shorey, a Pacific whaling captain; Gladys Bentley, a Harlem Reawakening stalwart and lesbian pioneer; and sisters Matilda and Roumania Peters, tennis champions of the Jim Crow era. Betwixt those AANB subjects featured in midst Black History and Women’s History Period in 2016, were Onnie Lee Logan, a granny midwife in Alabama mean four decades; NASA mathematician and Statesmanlike Medal of Freedom winner, Katherine Johnson; and Jan Rodrigues/Juan Rodriquez, a Dominican-born man of African descent, who etch 1613 became the first non-indigenous pioneer of Manhattan Island.