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=Premise= Our African American History class has been attempting to expand our understanding of what it means to be "African American". One is reminded of the musings of W.E.B. Du Bois in his seminal work //The Souls of Black Folk//, where he wrote, "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness... One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." In order to grasp the meaning of African American History, as if it we could somehow delineate it as something separate from or exceptional within the broader American History narrative, has been difficult. Even now we struggle with the concept of studying African American History as the "story of black folk" in this country, popularly focused on figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and undoubtedly in the future to include a focus on President Barack Obama. But if we allowed African American History to be cordoned off as "the stuff in history that only concerns black folks: slavery and lynching and marching on Selma" we would be doing a disservice, not only to legacy of great African Americans, or as they would have known selves, Negro Americans, but we would also continue to allow the legacies of America's people of color to be memorialized and ignored. When memorials are built it as if the entire has been told. And so we often feel of history that it is done and no longer relevant. However, that is not the story of African Americans. African American, we propose, is not something distinct from American history as it is held in the popular imagination. Indeed, the United States History courses we take in our high schools are undoubtedly //not// the master narrative, despite the pedestal that we have placed that curriculum on. United States history is the amalgam, yes even the incomplete gathering, of all the stories of America's peoples. After all, how can we divide our history along the lines of race when race is something that we made up? Through our studies of the sociology race and class, African American musical forms, and civil rights legislation and judiciary decisions, we have been journeying towards a broader understanding of one of the many ways in which African Americans contribute to the historical narrative of American people: it is the story of the contraction and expansion (and the oscillation between the two) of justice for America's people--America's white and black people, its poor and wealthy, its strong and weak, its native and immigrant, its helpless and its hopeful. This justice is the "struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to the [broader American] society, and to have these terms recognized." When Americans are able to be completely who they decide to be, no longer striving between being black and American, or female and American, or immigrant and American--then can the legacy of African American History, at least in this sense, be complete. include component="comments" page="home" limit="10"

=Purpose of this Wiki= Textbooks of American history are inherently flawed. We seek to compile the history of an entire nation within a few hundred pages and present it as an unquestionable story, typically featuring some overarching meta-narrative thread about how America continues to progress towards the height of freedom and liberty that the founding fathers envisioned for the land. Thus, even when the books discuss things like the massacre of the Lakota at Wounded Knee or the internment of the Japanese during the Second World War, it always carries with it a sense of a "bad decision in a horrible time" or "a horrible even that should be forgiven" or "a lesson learned on the journey to freedom and enlightenment". Meanwhile, we don't get the chance to call America out for being intolerant and racist and xenophobic and unjust. We don't get the opportunity to suggest that perhaps the Constitution, this document that we laud as worthy to die for, is really, in the biting and sarcastic words of William Lloyd Garrison, "A sacred compact! A sacred compact! What, then, is wicked and ignominious?" Nevertheless, we choose to challenge the master narrative. We choose to question this undying loyalty to a story about progress, when even after more than 10 years past the turn of the century we still have to fight for adequate representation of Latinos, Blacks and Black Americans, indigenous tribes, and women. As our most respected academics in our most honored institutions of higher education continue to press towards uncovering subaltern narratives in history and presenting them in volumes that are left on bookshelves, the authoritative texts in our classroom still tell the same old story of American exceptionalism--bolstered by an appeal to Providence--without regard for how that very idea has hurt so many lives and has never been true to begin with.

Find in our volumes additions and sometimes challenges to this story. Call it the subaltern. Call it protest. Call it propaganda. Call it truth. Call it what you may, but without it there is no American history. Because without the stories of the dispossessed, of the disenfranchised, of the forsaken and without the narratives of the struggle, of this undying determination to recreate a stubborn America then all we know of history and in history classes is what Voltaire said, and that is this: "History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions." And as the nation divides itself over issues of economics, immigration, race, class, gender equality, sexuality, international politics--oh, and the list seems to go on forever--let us be reminded that "**a country without a memory is a country of madmen**". If we forget the powerful hold injustice has had on this country we will continue to fail to see the powerful ways in which it cripples us today and will have no way of anticipating it and fighting against it tomorrow.