The New York Times bestseller. A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored twenty-four books and created twenty documentary films, including Finding Your Roots and Reconstruction- America after the Civil War. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans- Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program-Long Form, as well as a Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award
One of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2019
One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2019
Finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction Literature "Stony
the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white
nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize
African-American history--the spot under our country's rug where
the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually
swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug. . . . essential . . . a
history that very much needs telling and hearing in these times."
--Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review
"[A] luminous history of Reconstruction, and the savage white
backlash that derailed it. . . . Few authors approach such
difficult history with the unblinking clarity of Gates, the
esteemed Harvard professor, historian, and scholar . . . If anyone
wants to understand how the groundbreaking election of Barack Obama
as this nation's first black president was answered with Donald
Trump's feral white nationalism, Gates has provided a road map."
--The Boston Globe "Concise, powerful . . . an important addition
to America's evolving view of its own history." -The Economist "If
you will read the first 38 pages of Stony the Road by Henry Louis
Gates Jr., I believe several things are likely to happen: You will
commit to reading the rest of the book. Any remaining illusions
about a prevailing racial harmony you may have brought to the Trump
era will dissipate. And on reflection, you'll pretty much
completely understand how we got into our national racial
consciousness, as well as our current national political pickle."
--Martha's Vineyard Times "A necessary--and disturbingly
relevant--read." --People magazine The academics study the
tides of history, while the popular historians go out fishing to
find (and tag) the big fish that presumably make the ocean worth
watching. The tidalists have the tenure, but the fishermen sell all
the books. Gates, who is expert at both, catching fish while seeing
tides, leaves us with a simple, implicit moral: a long fight for
freedom, with too many losses along the way, can be sustained only
by a rich and complicated culture. Resilience and resistance are
the same activity, seen at different moments in the struggle. It's
a good thought to hold on to now. --Adam Gopnik, The New
Yorker "Lively . . . A compressed, yet surprisingly comprehensive
narrative sweep . . . With a dazzling selection of cartoon
stereotypes, the author shows that in the white-supremacist
reaction 'all along, the issue had been about the fabrication of
hateful imagery in order to justify robbing black people of their
constitutional rights and their economic potential.'" --The
Washington Post "Gates' book is a fascinating social and
intellectual history of the time between Reconstruction and the
rise of the Jim Crow period of American history. It's an absorbing
and necessary look at an era in which the hard-fought gains of
African-Americans were rolled back by embittered Southern whites --
an era that, in some ways, has never really ended. . . . Gates'
analysis is predictably brilliant, but he's also just a joy to
read." --NPR "Harrowing but necessary." --Time A timely
chronicle of the battle to define blackness that raged from the
Civil War through civil rights . . . Gates, whose own portrait
hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, writes not
only as a scholar of this culture war but as an influential
participant. --Julian Lucas, Harper's "Insightfully
demonstrates how history repeats itself . . . This excellent text,
augmented by a disturbing collection of late-19th- and
early-20th-century racist images, is indispensable for
understanding American history." --Publishers Weekly, starred
review "A provocative, lucid, and urgent contribution to the
study of race in America. " --Kirkus Reviews, starred
review "In Stony the Road, Gates demonstrates his chops as a
lyrical narrative historian. He surveys an era full of pain and
loss but also human persistence and astonishing cultural renewal in
African American life. Reconstruction and its long aftermath down
to the 1920s was a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions
and Gates's success here is in telling it as a moving and complex
story about politics, science, art, and ideas all wrapped in one
form after another of racism, managed and blunted by resistance.
White supremacy triumphs in this long dark era; it left many
casualties along the by-ways of America's worst sins. But this is a
work that shows that good history can also rise up as a redemption
song when we know the facts of what happened and why and how people
endure, thrive and create their own new worlds." --David W.
Blight, Yale University, and author of Frederick Douglass:
Prophet of Freedom "In this insightful, provocative book, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., reminds us how the hopes inspired by emancipation
and Reconstruction were dashed by a racist backlash, and how a new
system of inequality found cultural expression in Lost Cause
mythology and degrading visual images of African Americans. With
debate raging over how we should remember the Confederacy, and
basic rights again under threat, this unflinching look at our
history could not be more timely." --Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton
Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University, and author of
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution and the
forthcoming The Second Founding: How the Civil War and
Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
"How does white supremacy work? What does it look like? In this
piercing, haunting study, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chronicles an
American tragedy, the story of how white supremacy and Jim Crow
became the South's--and white America's--brutal answer to
Emancipation and Reconstruction. Who has best dismantled white
supremacy, and how? Gates tells those powerful stories, too, from
Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells to W. E. B. DuBois, through
generations of New Negroes, and New, New Negroes, battling back, in
struggles not yet ended." --Jill Lepore, author of These
Truths: A History of the United States "Stony the Road, a
must-read post Reconstruction history from one of the foremost
historians of our time, proves that the past can be prologue. It is
the history we are doomed to repeat if we remain unwilling to build
a democracy at peace with itself in America, a democracy that
respects the dignity and worth of every human being." --Rep.
John Lewis "Drawing on the finest current scholarship, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., offers a chilling account of Reconstruction's
overthrow and the rise of American apartheid. His book then
forcefully recasts the rise of the concept of the New Negro as a
weapon in the war against a resurgent white racism and the
phantasmagoria of Jim Crow popular culture that was all too real
and all too pervasive. As elements of that culture persist, Stony
the Road is all the more timely." --Sean Wilentz, author of
Bancroft Prize winner The Rise of American
Democracy
With vivid frankness, Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., confronts how the creation of the mythical 'Old Negro, ' a
subordinate, nearly undercut black America's best hopes. Redemption
only came through African American self-invention. The 'New Negro'
was a citizen who carved out a way forward with brilliance and
beauty as expressed in pictures, politics, and prose. With the
lyrical grace of a storyteller and the sage insight of a master
teacher, Professor Gates's Stony the Road tells how one people's
struggle came to define the best of America's ideals. --Martha
S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor at Johns
Hopkins University and author of Birthright Citizens "In
[Gates's] signature lucid and compelling approach to history . . .
a fresh, much-needed inquiry into a misunderstood yet urgently
relevant era." -- Booklist, starred
review
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