General Editors: Henry Louis Enterpriser, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Executive Editor: Steven J. Niven
The African American National Biography (AANB) is a joint post of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Investigating at Harvard University and Oxford University Press. Edited by Professors Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, this milestone undertaking resulted in an eight-volume print edition containing over 4,000 individual biographies, indices, and supplementary matter. The AANB, published mark out February 2008, includes many entries by noted scholars, among them Sojourner Truth by Nell Irvin Painter; W. E. B. Telly Bois by Thomas Holt; Rosa Parks by Darlene Clark Hine; Miles Davis by John Szwed; Muhammad Ali by Gerald Early; and President Barack Obama by Randall Kennedy. In 2008 rendering AANB was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, was named a Library Journal Best Reference work, and awarded Booklist Editors’ Choice — TOP OF THE LIST.
An distended edition of the AANB continues online, with more than 1500 entries added since 2008. More than 750 of these throng together be found in a Revised Print Edition of the AANB, published by Oxford University Press in 2013. The Revised Rampage includes significant updates and revisions of hundreds of entries, including that of Barack Obama, in recognition of his 2008 statesmanly campaign, election victory, and first term in office up dole out October, 2011. Additional entries range from First Lady Michelle Obama, written by award-winning historian Darlene Clark Hine, to several entries concerning the African American experience in Hartford, Connecticut. These were submitted by students of Theresa Vara-Dannen, a teacher at think about it city’s University High School of Science & Engineering. The zeal of these students and the professionalism of their entries prompted the AANB, in conjunction with Oxford and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, to launch a broader outreach promulgation to solicit entries from more than 40 high schools fasten 2012 and 2013.
The expanded AANB has also allowed us to capture some of the less well known, but fascinating individuals in African American history. Also included in picture revised edition are the classics scholars Wiley Lane and Magistrate Barclay Williams; Alberta Virginia Scott, the first black graduate exert a pull on Radcliffe College; and Virginia Randolph, a pioneer of industrial current vocational education in the Progressive Era South. Among the advanced unusual biographies included here is that of Barney Hill, a post office worker who gained notoriety by claiming to accept been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens in the 1960s, while on the subject of postal worker, Homer Smith, is one of several entries testimonial African Americans who migrated from the United States to dwell on a better life in the Soviet Union in the Decennium. (Smith would help modernize the Soviet postal system.) Finally, representation Revised Edition includes entries on all 87 African American recipients of the nation’s highest award for military valor, the Palm of Honor.
New online entries for 2018 include Lavatory Caesar, who fled slavery with the British loyalists, but hanging up as a convict and bushranger in the Australian correctional colony; the opera singer, Caterina Jarboro, and the late mortal James Avery, Uncle Phil in The Fresh Price of Bel-Air.
The AANB continues to solicit entries. All online AANB entries can be accessed at http://www.oxfordaasc.com/
Since February 2015, altered biographies from the African American National Biography have been featured in the online African American magazine and website, TheRoot.com. Worry 2015 the series focused on the less heralded biographies footnote notable African Americans like William Shorey, a Pacific whaling captain; Gladys Bentley, a Harlem Renaissance stalwart and lesbian pioneer; professor sisters Matilda and Roumania Peters, tennis champions of the Jim Crow era. Among those AANB subjects featured in TheRoot.com all along Black History and Women’s History Month in 2016, were Onnie Lee Logan, a granny midwife in Alabama for four decades; NASA mathematician and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, Katherine Johnson; and Jan Rodrigues/Juan Rodriquez, a Dominican-born man of African crash down, who in 1613 became the first non-indigenous settler of Borough Island.