Download or read book Another America The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It written by James Ciment and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first popular history of the former American slaves who founded, ruled, and lost Africa's first republic In 1820, a group of about eighty African Americans reversed the course of history and sailed back to Africa, to a place they would name after liberty itself. They went under the banner of the American Colonization Society, a white philanthropic organization with a dual agenda: to rid America of its blacks, and to convert Africans to Christianity. The settlers staked out a beachhead; their numbers grew as more boats arrived; and after breaking free from their white overseers, they founded Liberia—Africa's first black republic—in 1847. James Ciment's Another America is the first full account of this dramatic experiment. With empathy and a sharp eye for human foibles, Ciment reveals that the Americo-Liberians struggled to live up to their high ideals. They wrote a stirring Declaration of Independence but re-created the social order of antebellum Dixie, with themselves as the master caste. Building plantations, holding elegant soirees, and exploiting and even helping enslave the native Liberians, the persecuted became the persecutors—until a lowly native sergeant murdered their president in 1980, ending 133 years of Americo rule. The rich cast of characters in Another America rivals that of any novel. We encounter Marcus Garvey, who coaxed his followers toward Liberia in the 1920s, and the rubber king Harvey Firestone, who built his empire on the backs of native Liberians. Among the Americoes themselves, we meet the brilliant intellectual Edward Blyden, one of the first black nationalists; the Baltimore-born explorer Benjamin Anderson, seeking a legendary city of gold in the Liberian hinterland; and President William Tubman, a descendant of Georgia slaves, whose economic policies brought Cadillacs to the streets of Monrovia, the Liberian capital. And then there are the natives, men like Joseph Samson, who was adopted by a prominent Americo family and later presided over the execution of his foster father during the 1980 coup. In making Liberia, the Americoes transplanted the virtues and vices of their country of birth. The inspiring and troubled history they created is, to a remarkable degree, the mirror image of our own.
Download or read book Another America written by James Ciment and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first popular history of the former American slaves who founded, ruled, and lost Africa's first republic In 1820, a group of about eighty African Americans reversed the course of history and sailed back to Africa, to a place they would name after liberty itself. They went under the banner of the American Colonization Society, a white philanthropic organization with a dual agenda: to rid America of its blacks, and to convert Africans to Christianity. The settlers staked out a beachhead; their numbers grew as more boats arrived; and after breaking free from their white overseers, they founded Liberia—Africa's first black republic—in 1847. James Ciment's Another America is the first full account of this dramatic experiment. With empathy and a sharp eye for human foibles, Ciment reveals that the Americo-Liberians struggled to live up to their high ideals. They wrote a stirring Declaration of Independence but re-created the social order of antebellum Dixie, with themselves as the master caste. Building plantations, holding elegant soirees, and exploiting and even helping enslave the native Liberians, the persecuted became the persecutors—until a lowly native sergeant murdered their president in 1980, ending 133 years of Americo rule. The rich cast of characters in Another America rivals that of any novel. We encounter Marcus Garvey, who coaxed his followers toward Liberia in the 1920s, and the rubber king Harvey Firestone, who built his empire on the backs of native Liberians. Among the Americoes themselves, we meet the brilliant intellectual Edward Blyden, one of the first black nationalists; the Baltimore-born explorer Benjamin Anderson, seeking a legendary city of gold in the Liberian hinterland; and President William Tubman, a descendant of Georgia slaves, whose economic policies brought Cadillacs to the streets of Monrovia, the Liberian capital. And then there are the natives, men like Joseph Samson, who was adopted by a prominent Americo family and later presided over the execution of his foster father during the 1980 coup. In making Liberia, the Americoes transplanted the virtues and vices of their country of birth. The inspiring and troubled history they created is, to a remarkable degree, the mirror image of our own.
Download or read book The Price of Liberty written by Claude Andrew Clegg III and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-09-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nineteenth-century America, the belief that blacks and whites could not live in social harmony and political equality in the same country led to a movement to relocate African Americans to Liberia, a West African colony established by the United States government and the American Colonization Society in 1822. In The Price of Liberty, Claude Clegg accounts for 2,030 North Carolina blacks who left the state and took up residence in Liberia between 1825 and 1893. By examining both the American and African sides of this experience, Clegg produces a textured account of an important chapter in the historical evolution of the Atlantic world. For almost a century, Liberian emigration connected African Americans to the broader cultures, commerce, communication networks, and epidemiological patterns of the Afro-Atlantic region. But for many individuals, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia were tempered by complicated relationships with the Africans, whom they dispossessed of land. Liberia soon became a politically unstable mix of newcomers, indigenous peoples, and "recaptured" Africans from westbound slave ships. Ultimately, Clegg argues, in the process of forging the world's second black-ruled republic, the emigrants constructed a settler society marred by many of the same exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial regimes.
Download or read book Liberia South Carolina written by John M. Coggeshall and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows members of a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community's 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.
Download or read book This Our Dark Country written by Catherine Reef and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the history of the colony, later the independent nation of Liberia, which was established on the west coast of Africa in 1822 as a haven for free African-Americans.
Download or read book Liberia and the United States during the Cold War written by D. Dunn and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once a diplomatic history and case study of African foreign policy and presidential leadership, this book illustrates how development and security assistance were used by the US as antidotes against communism in the Cold War and how Liberia was able occasionally to profit from the arrangement.
Download or read book African American Officers in Liberia written by Brian Shellum and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story of seventeen African American officers who trained, reorganized, and commanded the Liberian Frontier Force to defend Liberia between 1910 and 1942"--
Download or read book Little Liberia written by Jonny Steinberg and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In his latest book, Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York, Steinberg takes us to Park Hill Avenue on Staten Island, where a community of Liberians have made their home. Through interviews and shadowing of two community leaders, Steinberg strives to understand the peculiarities of this community; while it appears at times as if a piece of Liberia has been sliced off and dropped in New York, the Park Hill community is ravaged by conflict between different interest groups. To understand what is going on in 2008 New York, Steinberg travels back - back to Liberia and back to the country's tragic recent history of civil war, military coups and mass exterminations. The story of Liberia is a gruesome and miserable one but Steinberg's empathy for his subjects never allows the narrative to descend into voyeurism. The combination of hard nosed investigative journalism, a gift for storytelling and an obvious empathy for the characters that he shadows makes Steinberg an author who demands to be read, whatever the subject matter. A brilliant and important book which will delight Steinberg's thousands of followers and doubtless earn him many more"--Book Lounge.
Download or read book Slaves to Racism written by Benjamin G. Dennis and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American racism traps Blacks -- even in Africa. Prof. Dennis chronicles the compulsive and repetitious nature of racism and its destructive effects on peoples and societies, Dr. Dennis's observations of the twists of irony and misplaced pride on all sides will provoke a wry smile as well as dismay. During the 1990s, Liberia descended into civil war and anarchy. African-Liberian rebel groups roamed the countryside randomly killing as they vied for power. Doe was killed by a segment of these rebel groups and warlord Charles Taylor eventually became president in 1997.
Download or read book My Improbable Journey to America written by Jarvis Sankalan Mengarpuan and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author Sankalan was in the sixth grade when his guardians threw him out of their government-owned house in the picturesque community of Germany, Kakata, Liberia, West Africa. Why? Because he went to borrow a uniform from his friend to sit for the Liberian Government national examinations designed for sixth, ninth, and twelfth graders in the sixties and seventies. Booker Washington Institute (BWI) campus was the site of the exams. The old uniform he had showed his naked anatomy in public, which was not only humiliating but embarrassingly inappropriate in such public arena. How did he continue school as an independent homeless youth in his home country, Liberia? What difficult circumstances did he experience in Liberia during his formative years in the quest of education? What propelled him to undertake this incredible journey to the United States of America, a country in which many Africans or Liberians believe that ‘Money grows on trees,’ a country in which people are territorial by nature and protective of their personal space, a country in which the culture values are diametrically opposed to the African or Liberian way of life? How did he maintain his moral integrity to his family, after he was pressured to engage in an illegal marriage proposal to obtain permanent resident status (Green Card) in his first year in the America? And how did he successfully complete his educational journey with perseverance despite insurmountable problems along his path in the US? Answers to these questions are chronicled in this riveting account of an intrepid Liberian in his book: My Improbable Journey to America—A Memoir of Reflections.
Download or read book Empire of Rubber written by Gregg Mitman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.
Download or read book Slaves to Racism written by Benjamin G. Dennis and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Slaves to Racism is a historical eyewitness account of the effect of racism in two countries, one black, one white, showing how American racism traps blacks even in Africa. The tales he tells illustrate the twists of irony and misplaced pride on all sides. Prof. Dennis chronicles the compulsive and repetitious nature of racism and its destructive effects on peoples and societies. During the 1990s, Liberia descended into civil war and anarchy. African-Liberian rebel groups roamed the countryside randomly killing as they vied for power. Doe was killed by a segment of these rebel groups and warlord Charles Taylor eventually became president in 1997. In 2003, Taylor was deposed by rebel groups and is now on trial at The Hague for war crimes. Despite Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's democratic election in 2005, Liberia remains in ruins as a classic failed state in Africa. The obvious question is: Why did the Negro experiment planted in Africa in 1822 fail so miserably? Liberia was doomed from the start. The sins of the master were inevitably passed on to the freed slaves who returned to Africa to 'make a fresh start.' To assert status the Americo-Liberians blindly followed the worst habits of the whites, imposing themselves as a superior class on the 'African Liberians' who had never left. With only a superficial knowledge of Western culture, they imagined the white way without truly understanding it, and made Liberia a caricature of Southern society. Prof. Dennis compares the prejudice and discrimination between groups in Liberia with the patterns he has encountered between and among blacks and whites in the United States, from blatant bigotry to the almost subliminal boundaries that still exist even among liberal communities that 'want more blacks.'"--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Two Centuries of US Military Operations in Liberia written by Niels Hahn and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews the history of the United States-Liberia relations from the early 1820s to 2015, with particular attention paid to the role of the US armed forces. Contrary to most literature on the genesis and development of Liberia, this book demonstrates how US military power has been the primary influence shaping Liberia's history. This includes the role played by the US military in the founding of Liberia, the protection of the country during the European formal colonial era, multiple covert operations in securing US-friendly administrations in Liberia, and direct military interventions when necessary to secure American interests in the region.
Download or read book Liberia America s Footprint in Africa written by Jesse N. Mongrue M. Ed and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Liberia and the United States are closely tied together, but few people have taken the necessary steps to understand the complicated relationship between the two countries. Liberia: America's Footprint in Africa traces the history of an African nation whose fate is closely tied to an uprising of slaves that began on the island that is now Haiti. The violence there caused people in the United States to wonder about the future of slavery and blacks in their own nation. In this detailed history written by a Liberian educator, you'll discover: - how the American Colonization Society played a critical role in the creation of Liberia; - how courageous blacks living in the United States persevered in seeking freedom; - how Liberia is culturally, socially, and politically connected to the United States. Discover the rich history of two nations and why Liberia remains relevant today. Enriched with interviews of scholars, Liberian community elders and detailed research, Liberia: America's Footprint in Africa is a step-by-step account of an overlooked country.
Download or read book America and Liberia written by J. Mamadee Ghorpu-Do Woah-Tee, Sr. and published by . This book was released on 2005-02-01 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These stories, many published here for the first time, were written during training missions 40,000 feet above sea level. As a Flight Surgeon, Dr. Rettek was required to log a number of hours of flying time each month and since his Additional Crew Member (ACM), status on these flights had no specific mission assignment, he occupied flight deck space formerly assigned to navigators. There he wrote without disturbance and was able to enjoy silence by turning off his headset. By turning it back on, he was able to listen to the flight crew's ever flowing, often engaging conversations. The story Routine Flight is told almost exclusively through intercom dialogue. Since many life-impacting decisions often depend on the clarity and accuracy of these flimsy, sometimes weak, barely audible transmissions, these one-dimensional staccato sounds become an essential part of in-flight survival. Understanding must be exact, immediate and accurate. The mixture of sudden rapidly given commands with light, sometimes-raunchy conversation among crewmembers makes for a gripping and humorous story. In other stories, the ghost of a famous painter finds himself alone as he desperately tries to convince his widow to remain with him in their private world. The parents of a young woman appear to her in the night, pleading with her to avenge their murder so that they may cease their wandering in the Land of the Dead. A retired Colonel is infatuated with a woman his daughter's age. A young eavesdropper hears an unemployed father plead with his shame-faced daughter to turn away from prostitution, money from which is helping support the family. A medical student sleeps with his distraught instructor unaware that her pilot husband has just been killed. A young boy witnesses the murder of a woman raped by a gang led by his uncle whom he idolizes. The stories differ one from the other both in style and story line, giving Dr. Rettek the latitude he needs to display his unusual ability to handle difficult material including emotions that touch us all; love, loyalty, regret, courage, self-recrimination and more. His characters come to life through heartfelt, lively dialogue as they play out the discoveries they make about themselves once caught up in unusual life situations. As in his other writings, these stories, almost all of which are fictionalized accounts of serendipitous events in his own life, reflect an unusual ear for language, an original and a fertile and creative imagination.
Download or read book The African American Mosaic written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This guide lists the numerous examples of government documents, manuscripts, books, photographs, recordings and films in the collections of the Library of Congress which examine African-American life. Works by and about African-Americans on the topics of slavery, music, art, literature, the military, sports, civil rights and other pertinent subjects are discussed"--
Download or read book Liberia Or Mr Peyton s Experiments written by Sarah Josepha Buell Hale and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-19 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
