This course explores the history of African Americans from the abolition of chattel slavery to the present. In addition to exploring Black people’s centuries-old striving for “community,” identity, and solidarity within local, national, and global contexts, we pay special attention to differences and diversity, particularly regional, gender and class distinctions within African American communities. We will also pay close attention to the contours of Black life, thought, culture and resistance in the late 19th and 20th centuries. We want students to gain new insights into ex-slaves and ex-masters, lynch victims and lynch mobs, women and men, working people and employers, rich and poor. More importantly, students should know how all of these relationships are interconnected to American culture, the economy, politics, power, and tradition.