Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book designed as a world history companion that concentrates on retelling many of the important episodes in the global past from African points of view. It focuses on social history–an exploration of the ways in which daily life, work, home and family, and relationship patterns changed for African individuals and communities. The book emphasizes a specific region of Africa–for example, the Atlantic seaboard of the continent, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Morocco. It discusses the primary sources in the process of analyzing the ways in which Africans thought, talked, and represent the themes. These sources include stories, newspaper articles, poems, speeches, police reports, diaries, and photographs. The book connects Africa to other parts of the globe by situating it within the networks, systems, and exchanges of ideas, people, and things that characterized the period in question.