Michael Harriot argues that the American history most people learned was edited to leave Black Americans at the margins. His retelling moves them to the center, backed by primary sources and delivered with open humor.
Readical Key Points
A New York Times bestseller and an NAACP Image Award nominee, according to the publisher
Starred review from Publishers Weekly; also reviewed in Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews
Ranges from Africans in America before 1619 through the Civil War era to the 21st century
Content note: addresses slavery, racism and discrimination directly
Hardcover, 432 pages, Dey Street Books, 2023; illustrated, with a bibliography and index
Harriot's case is that the standard account was shaped by the people who wrote it, and that Black experience belongs at the core of the national story rather than in a side chapter. He works from primary documents and from generations of Black scholarship and journalism, and he folds in stories from his own family. Kirkus Reviews notes humorous sidebars and reader activities. The tone swings from sarcasm to anger to straight storytelling.
It serves readers who want the argument in the author's own voice, teachers and book groups looking for a different way in, and readers ready to set his account beside the textbook version. Harriot is not adding a chapter to the familiar story. He is rewriting whose story it was in the first place.
About the Author
Michael Harriot is a journalist, poet and political commentator who has written for The Root and theGrio, with work appearing in the Washington Post and The Atlantic. He has been honored for commentary by the National Association of Black Journalists and created the podcast Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History. He studied at Auburn University and Florida State University.
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