African-American studies  

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African-American Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the history, culture, and politics of Black Americans. Taken broadly, the field studies not only the cultures of people of African descent in the United States, but the cultures of the entire African diaspora but it has been defined in different ways. The field includes scholars of African-American literature, history, politics, religion and religious studies, sociology, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.<ref>http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/African_American_studies.aspx</ref>

Intensive academic efforts to reconstruct African-American history began in the late 19th century (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1896). Among the pioneers in the first half of the 20th century were Carter G. Woodson,<ref>See Pero Gaglo Dagbovie: The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene, University of Illinois Press, 2007.</ref> Herbert Aptheker, Melville Herskovits, and Lorenzo Dow Turner.<ref>Jason Kelly, "Lorenzo Dow Turner, PhD ’26: A linguist who identified the African influences in the Gullah dialect" (University of Chicago Magazine, November-December 2010):

“Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) ... was considered not only the defining work of Gullah language and culture but also the beginning of a new field, African American studies. ‘Until then it was pretty much thought that all of the African knowledge and everything had been erased by slavery. Turner showed that was not true,’ [curator Alcione] Amos says. ‘He was a pioneer. He was the first one to make the connections between African Americans and their African past.’”</ref><ref>Holland Cotter, "A Language Explorer Who Heard Echoes of Africa" (New York Times, September 2, 2010):

“Turner published ‘Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect,’ a book that would help pave the way for the field of African-American studies in the 1960s.”</ref>

Programs and departments of African-American studies were first created in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of inter-ethnic student and faculty activism at many universities, sparked by a five-month strike for black studies at San Francisco State. In February 1968, San Francisco State hired sociologist Nathan Hare to coordinate the first black studies program and write a proposal for the first Department of Black Studies; the department was created in September 1968 and gained official status at the end of the five-months strike in the spring of 1969. The creation of programs and departments in Black studies was a common demand of protests and sit-ins by minority students and their allies, who felt that their cultures and interests were underserved by the traditional academic structures.

See also

• Black Feminism
• Black matriarchy
• Black Womanism
• Religion in Black America

Non-African-American specific:

• Pan-African studies
• African studies
• Ethnic Studies
• Asian American Studies
• Chicano Studies
• Native American Studies
• Africana Studies
• Afro-Latino Studies