ABSTRACT
The Harvard scholar replied candidly that he had not regarded the Negro as an “historical character.” The result of Wright’s researches was a piece entitled, “Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorers,” published not in a history journal but in American Anthropologist and reprinted a generation later by W. E. B. Du Bois in Phylon. The explosion was aided substantially by the sheer leap in numbers of doctorate-carrying historians during the sixties and early seventies. During the civil rights years the overall boom in black history fed upon itself. Increased interest in the field prompted swift republication of primary and secondary sources long out-of-print, a trend that usually encouraged new scholarship. It has been the historiographic achievement of the era since i960 to draw forth a mass of detailed monographic material on early Afro-Americans that far exceeds all previous work combined.
