ABSTRACT
The work and legacy of early African American historians were long neglected as a topic of scholarly enquiry. This is especially true of those historians who wrote before the Civil War, and were often self-published (Parfait 2014a, 2014b). As Pero Dagbovie notes in his pioneering study The Early Black History Movement: Carter G. Woodson and Lorenzo Johnston Greene (2007), Earl E. Thorpe was the one who wrote the “rst monograph on black historians” (Dagbovie 2007, 26). Thorpe included such antebellum historians as Robert Benjamin Lewis, James W.C. Pennington, William Cooper Nell, and William Wells Brown. A few years later, Benjamin Quarles explored “Black History’s Antebellum Origins,” in an essay published in 1979 in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. The essay was later included in his 1988 collection of essays Black Mosaic. In 1985, after years, even decades, of painstaking research,1 John Hope Franklin issued his biography of nineteenth-century historian George Washington Williams. Deborah White aptly called her review of the work “Resurrecting a Historian” (White 1987).
