Coming Home to Harlem: The New Home of Missions in the Black American Community

By Elisabeth Engel

In Encountering Empire, historian Elisabeth Engel traces how black American missionaries — men and women grappling with their African heritage — established connections in Africa during the heyday of European colonialism. Reconstructing the black American “colonial encounter,” a neglected chapter of Atlantic history, Engel analyzes the images, transatlantic relationships, and possibilities of representation African American missionaries developed for themselves while negotiating colonial regimes. Between 1900 and 1939, these missionaries paved the way for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the oldest independent black American institution, to establish a presence in Britain's sub-Saharan colonies. African Americans thus used imperial structures for their own self-determination.

This post, drawn from the book's fourth chapter, discusses how concepts of home crystallized a counterculture of diasporic pan-Africanism within AME missionary circles. A key part of defining “home” for these missionaries was moving to a new headquarters in Harlem.

Progressive Era, Race & Ethnicity, ReligionGuest UserDecember 26, 2017Comment

Jewish New York

By Geraldine Gudefin

Whether they are thinking of bagels or Woody Allen, to many Americans, Jews are intimately connected, if not synonymous with New York. Jewish New York, an edited volume from New York University Press out this month, explores the historical developments that have led to this association and asks: "when and in what sense did New York become a city of promises for Jews"? The book is a condensed version of the prize-winning City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (2012), the first comprehensive history on the subject. Synthesizing three volumes into one single tome, it is also half the length, at 500 pages. The book, which contains essays by Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard B. Block, and Daniel Soyer, has greatly benefited from the careful editing of Deborah Dash Moore, a prominent historian of Jewish America. Organized into broad themes, the book is divided into four parts that follow a roughly linear chronological arc, from the colonial period to the present, with eleven chapters and a visual essay by art historian Diana L. Linden.

Race & Ethnicity, Religion, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 7, 2017Comment