This study examines the development of African-American history and historical consciousness in black communities up to the professionalization of African-American history in 1915. Although history as an area of scholarly inquiry was not professionalized prior to 1884 among white Americans and not until 1915 among African Americans, early on, black people used history to create a discursive space to critique the most pressing issues of the era such as slavery, colonization, disfranchisement, and racial degradation in general. This study begins with the years prior to the founding of Freedom's Journal (1827) and ends with the establishment of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915. As the first viable organ of public opinion in the black community, Freedom's Journal occupies a central place in the creation of an historical discourse. And the formation of the ASNLH signaled the formal move toward professionalization within the ranks of African-American historians.
This study uses primarily traditional historical methods, but it also relies heavily on textual analysis, an approach to reading texts which is widely used in literary criticism, especially the work of Henry Lewis Gates, (most notably in Figures in Black: Words, Signs and The "Racial" Self, (1987). The "Black Atlantic" model, a paradigm that places emphasis on the interaction of diasporic cultures and transcendence of national boundaries, detailed in Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity (1993) is used implicitly in the study as a means of establishing the connections between African-American writers and their diasporic concerns. This is important because from the inception of black historical writing, Africa and the diaspora were always subjects of investigation and analysis.
My study is the first to offer a complete history of the emergence of African-American history as a viable subspecialty of American history. It is a significant departure from earlier studies because it locates the beginnings of African-American historical writing in the antebellum period. More important, this study examines the internal logic (methodology, argumentation, and sources), and the construction and dissemination of history in the African-American community.