This remarkable biography, based on much new information, examines the life and times of one of the most prominent African-American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Born in New York in 1819, Alexander Crummell was educated at Queen's College, Cambridge, after being denied admission to Yale University and the Episcopal Seminary on purely racial grounds. In 1853, steeped in the classical tradition and modern political theory, he went to the Republic of Liberia as an Episcopal missionary, but was forced to flee to Sierra Leone in 1872, having barely survived republican Africa's first coup. He accepted a pastorate in Washington, D.C., and in 1897 founded the American Negro Academy, where the influence of his ideology was felt by W.E.B. Du Bois and future progenitors of the Garvey Movement. A pivotal nineteenth-century thinker, Crummell is essential to any understanding of twentieth-century black nationalism.

Wilson Moses bases this collection of essays on the thought of five major African-American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus J. Garvey. Highlighting the intellectual struggles and contradictions of these personalities, with regard to individual morality and collective reform, Moses reveals how they contributed to strategies for black progress. He analyzes their thinking within the contexts of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, Social Darwinism, and progressivism. Wilson J. Moses is Ferree Professor of American History and Senior Fellow of the Arts and Humanities Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. He has been Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Free University of Berlin and Fulbright Guest Professor at the University of Vienna. His books include Liberian Dreams: Back to Africa Narratives from the 1850s (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), and Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge, 1998).

Afrocentrism and its history have long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly reasonable. A level presentation in what is often a shouting match, Afrotopia is a rich history of black intellectual life and the concept of race.

Afrocentrism and its history have long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly reasonable. A level presentation in what is often a shouting match, Afrotopia is a rich history of black intellectual life and the concept of race.

Wilson Moses bases this collection of essays on the thought of five major African-American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus J. Garvey. Highlighting the intellectual struggles and contradictions of these personalities, with regard to individual morality and collective reform, Moses reveals how they contributed to strategies for black progress. He analyzes their thinking within the contexts of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, Social Darwinism, and progressivism. Wilson J. Moses is Ferree Professor of American History and Senior Fellow of the Arts and Humanities Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. He has been Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Free University of Berlin and Fulbright Guest Professor at the University of Vienna. His books include Liberian Dreams: Back to Africa Narratives from the 1850s (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), and Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge, 1998).

In Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus, Wilson Jeremiah Moses provides a critical assessment of Thomas Jefferson and the Jeffersonian influence. Scholars of American history have long debated the legacy of Thomas Jefferson. However, Moses deviates from other interpretations by positioning himself within an older, 'Federalist' historiographic tradition, offering vigorous and insightful commentary on Jefferson, the man and the myth. Moses specifically focuses on Jefferson's complexities and contradictions. Measuring Jefferson's political accomplishments, intellectual contributions, moral character, and other distinguishing traits against contemporaries like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin but also figures like Machiavelli and Frederick the Great, Moses contends that Jefferson fell short of the greatness of others. Yet amid his criticism of Jefferson, Moses paints him as a cunning strategist, an impressive intellectual, and a consummate pragmatist who continually reformulated his ideas in a universe that he accurately recognized to be unstable, capricious, and treacherous.

The "golden age" of black nationalism began in response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and extended to the time of Marcus Garvey's imprisonment in 1925. During these seventy-five years, an upsurge of back-to-Africa schemes stimulated a burst of literary output and nurtured the growth of a tradition that flourished until the end of the century. This tradition then underwent a powerful revitalization with the rise of Marcus Garvey and the ideological Pan-Africanism of W.E.B. Du Bois.
In this controversial volume, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, Wilson Jeremiah Moses argues that by adopting European and American nationalist and separatist doctrines, black nationalism became, ironically, a vehicle for the assimilationist values among black American intellectuals. First providing the historical background to black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, he then explores the specific manifestations of the tradition in the intellectual and institutional history of black Americans. He describes the work of Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington--specifically challenging the traditional interpretation of Washington as a betrayer of Douglass' vision--and the National Association of Colored Women.
Moses also examines the tradition of genteel black nationalism in literature, concentrating on the novels of Martin Delany and Sutton Griggs, as well as the early poetry of W.E.B. Du Bois. Using literary history instead of literary criticism, he identifies the particularly Anglo-African qualities in these works. He concludes with a description of those trends that led to the decline of classical black nationalism at the time of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro Movement," which attempted to redefine the cultural and spiritual goals of Afro-Americans. Offering both a critical and sympathetic treatment of the black nationalist movement in the United States, Moses' study will stimulate further debate concerning the nature of the assimilationist tendencies dominating black nationalist ideology in the "golden age."