ABSTRACT
Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, the author, was born of ex-slave parents near New Canton, Buckingham County, Virginia, December 19, 1875. His father was James Henry Woodson, and his mother Anne Eliza (Riddle) Woodson. As he was one of a rather large family of nine children, his parents, who started life in poverty, could not provide him with the ordinary comforts of life and could not regularly send him to the five-months district school taught alternately by his two uncles John M. and James B. Riddle. He had never been as far as ten miles from his home nor had he seen a train to ride on it until he was seventeen years old. In this rural atmosphere, however, he managed largely by self-instruction to master the fundamentals of the common school subjects by the time he reached this age.
