Carter G. Woodson’s Journal of Negro History Issues Featuring Black Religious History, Abolition Studies, and African Diasporic Scholarship, 1931–1938

Carter Godwin Woodson

Archive

Woodson, Carter Godwin. The Journal of Negro History. Archive of two significant issues published in 1931 and 1938 documenting the institutional growth and expanding scholarly scope of African American historiography during the interwar period. The material records Black intellectual production, historical scholarship, and diasporic research through the editorial and publishing activities of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, founded by Carter G. Woodson and Jesse E. Moorland in 1915. These issues include scholarship on slavery, Reconstruction, Black religious institutions, international colonial politics, abolitionist movements, and urban Black life at a time when Black scholarship remained marginalized within predominantly white academic institutions. The journal served as one of the principal vehicles through which Black historians circulated archival research, fostered interdisciplinary inquiry, and established African American history as a formal academic field. The archive provides primary-source evidence for the maturation of Black historical studies and diasporic intellectual thought in the early twentieth century.

Woodson, Carter Godwin, ed. The Journal of Negro History. Lancaster, PA, and Washington, D.C.: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1931 and 1938. Two issues in publisher’s printed wrappers comprising Vol. XVI, No. 4 (October 1931) and Vol. XXIII, No. 2 (April 1938). Each issue measures approximately 10 x 6.5 inches and contains 125 and 144 pages respectively. [1] Vol. XVI, No. 4 (October 1931). Includes Eugene Portlette Southall’s “The Attitude of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Toward the Negro from 1844 to 1870,” examining racial theology and denominational policy during and after slavery. Rayford W. Logan contributes “The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, a Problem in International Relations,” an early analysis of colonial governance and African international politics anticipating his later work in Pan-African and diplomatic studies. Leo H. Hirsch Jr.’s extensive “The Negro and New York, 1783 to 1865” surveys slavery, free Black life, and antislavery politics in New York before the Civil War. The issue concludes with organizational reports and a memorial tribute titled “The Passing of George W. Cook.” [2] Vol. XXIII, No. 2 (April 1938). Opens with Benjamin Quarles’s “The Breach Between Douglass and Garrison,” reassessing the political and ideological divide between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison within abolitionist movements and Black political organizing. Charles H. Wesley contributes “The Abolition of Negro Apprenticeship in the British Empire,” situating emancipation and labor reform within broader imperial and diasporic contexts. Anthropologists Hortense Powdermaker and Joseph Semper examine labor and education patterns among African Americans in Connecticut through “Education and Occupation among New Haven Negroes,” while Waldemar Westergaard’s “A St. Croix Map of 1796” analyzes plantation geography and Caribbean slavery through archival cartographic evidence. The issue additionally contains scholarly reviews in English and French reflecting the journal’s international intellectual orientation.

These issues record the widening methodological and geographic range of African American scholarship during the interwar years, when Black historians connected local histories of slavery and segregation to international questions of empire, labor, abolition, and diasporic identity. The journal’s interdisciplinary composition includes historical research, anthropology, political analysis, religious studies, and archival geography within a single scholarly forum. Contributions by Rayford Logan, Benjamin Quarles, Charles H. Wesley, and Hortense Powdermaker reflect the emergence of scholars and allied researchers who reshaped twentieth-century understandings of African American and diasporic history. Minor edgewear and faint toning to wrappers with light handling wear; overall very good condition. A pair of interwar issues documenting the consolidation and internationalization of early African American historical scholarship.

Item #21789

Price: $425.00