Here are 100 books that National Rhythms, African Roots fans have personally recommended if you like
National Rhythms, African Roots.
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I taught American, European, and World History at the University of British Columbia for over 30 years. I was constantly reminded of the dynamics and consequences of slavery and how a history of black America should be more prevalent in understanding the development of American culture, institutions, and identity over time. In writing two books on colonial America and the American Revolution, the roots of America’s racial divide became clearer and the logic of permanence seemed irresistible. My Shaping the New World was inspired by a course I taught for years on slavery in the Americas. Compiling the bibliography and writing the chapters on slave women and families helped to refine my understanding of the “peculiar institution” in all its both common and varied characteristics throughout the Americas.
An invaluable scholarly source for understanding the Atlantic slave system at its source. Among the book’s virtues are details of the cultures and politics in the area of European penetration and African slavery itself and the African participation in the European trade. This book should be recognized with the extensive literature on the Atlantic slave trade for its acknowledgment of the great range of African languages and cultures that ended up in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.
This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. African institutions, political events, and economic structures shaped Africa's voluntary involvement in the Atlantic arena before 1680. Africa's economic and military strength gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics of colonization which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers, and he explains why African slaves were placed in roles of central significance. Estate…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
When I decided to familiarize myself with eighteenth-century authors of African descent by editing their writings, I didn’t anticipate becoming their biographer. In annotating their writings, I quickly became intrigued and challenged by trying to complete the biographical equivalent of jigsaw puzzles, ones which often lack borders, as well as many pieces. How does one recover, or at least credibly speculate about, what’s missing? Even the pieces one has may be from unreliable sources. But the thrill of the hunt for, and the joy of discovering, as many pieces as possible make the challenge rewarding. My recommendations demonstrate ways others have also met the biographical challenge.
Sensbach combines impressive archival skills with sophisticated analyses of textual and visual evidence to reconstruct the extraordinary life of a formerly enslaved woman of African descent, whose interracial marriage and missionary calling took her from the Caribbean to Germany and West Africa.
Rebecca’s Revivalis a methodological tour de force, working from fragmentary evidence to reveal the complexity of issues of slavery, religion, and identity in the transatlantic eighteenth-century world.
Refusing to over-simplify the certainty of the evidence or its implications, Sensbach’s frequent use of words like “may,” “might,” “if,” and “perhaps” reflects not the weakness of indecision but rather the strength of a historian who discriminates the known from the unknown, and more importantly, the possible from the probable.
Rebecca's Revival is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman--a slave turned evangelist--who helped inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebecca Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and society. Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group of German proselytizers from the Moravian Church. She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other…
I am a philologist with a passion for Atlantic cultural history. What started with a research project on the African-American Pinkster tradition and the African community in seventeenth-century Dutch Manhattan led me to New Orleans’ Congo Square and has meanwhile expanded to the African Atlantic islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With fluency in several foreign languages, I have tried to demonstrate in my publications that we can achieve a better understanding of Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas by adopting a multilingual and Atlantic perspective.
This edited volume studies Black festive traditions in the Americas that are rooted in African interpretations of early-modern Iberian customs. It shows how, from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholic brotherhoods as spaces for cultural and religious expression, social organization, and mutual aid. By demonstrating that the syncretic development of certain Black performance traditions in the Americas is a phenomenon that already set in on African soil, it breaks with previous scholarship that (mis)interpreted these festive traditions in the Americas as new, Creole syncretisms. I am convinced that this pioneering book will strongly affect the way future generations of scholars will come to understand Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas.
This volume demonstrates how, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholicism and Christian-derived celebrations as spaces for autonomous cultural expression, social organization, and political empowerment. Their appropriation of Catholic-based celebrations calls into question the long-held idea that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora either resignedly accepted Christianity or else transformed its religious rituals into syncretic objects of stealthy resistance.
In cities and on plantations throughout the Americas, men and women of African birth or descent staged mock battles against heathens, elected Christian queens and kings with great pageantry, and…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I am a philologist with a passion for Atlantic cultural history. What started with a research project on the African-American Pinkster tradition and the African community in seventeenth-century Dutch Manhattan led me to New Orleans’ Congo Square and has meanwhile expanded to the African Atlantic islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With fluency in several foreign languages, I have tried to demonstrate in my publications that we can achieve a better understanding of Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas by adopting a multilingual and Atlantic perspective.
This book studies Atlantic cultural history from the perspective of language, with a focus on Curaçao. A unique characteristic of this small Caribbean island is that its colonial rulers spoke Dutch, whereas the Black population used an Afro-Iberian creole called Papiamentu as its lingua franca. Jacob’s study embarks on an intriguing quest for the origins of this language, tracing it back to Portuguese-based creoles from the Cape Verde Islands and the nearby African West Coast. It argues that this seventeenth-century Portuguese-based creole later underwent significant Spanish influence and thereby constitutes a case of “reduplicated language contact.”
This study embarks on the intriguing quest for the origins of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu. In the literature on the issue, widely diverging hypotheses have been advanced, but scholars have not come close to a consensus. The present study casts new and long-lasting light on the issue, putting forward compelling interdisciplinary evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curacao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting…
The most important words of advice my incisive editor at Knopf, Victoria Wilson, gave me while I was laboring upon my biography of Martha Graham – coming out in October, you can pre-order it now – was to say that “she was not a goddess, and you don’t want to worship her.” Yes, I had the nerve to take on this formidable and forbidding figure as a result of bearing witness to her anti-War masterwork, Chronicle, on a winter evening fourteen years ago. Yes, I believed that modern dance was the missing link in my long exploration of American modernism. And yes, I believe that I have proven my point, painting Martha Graham’s portrait as a person – rather than an icon.
I am sure many of you already know this visionary philosopher from his ground-breaking The Hero With a Thousand Faces. You may not be aware that Campbell was married to Jean Erdman, one of Martha Graham’s principal dancers in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Campbell’s initiations to modern dance came at Sarah Lawrence College when witnessing Erdman as Graham’s student; and then at Bennington, where Erdman performed with Graham’s company. His own learned background in the archetypal ethos of C.G. Jung made Campbell a prime candidate for Graham’s deeply-digging, Nietzschean/ecstatic archaic/abstract movement vocabulary. The choreographer and the professor spoke the same kinaesthetic language, Erdman remembered. There were many late nights when “Martha would call Joe on the phone” with some arcane question about her mythographic pieces in progress – Night Journey and Errand into the Maze. Many of Campbell’s essays in this book were first published in Dance Observer…
Joseph Campbell’s collected writings on dance and art, edited and introduced by Nancy Allison, CMA, the founder of Jean Erdman Dance, and including Campbell’s unpublished manuscript “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts,” the book he was working on when he died.
Dance was one of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s wide-ranging passions. His wife, Jean Erdman, was a leading figure in modern dance who worked with Martha Graham and had Merce Cunningham in her first company. When Campbell retired from teaching in 1972, he and Erdman formed the Theater of the Open Eye, where for nearly fifteen years…
I am an ex-lawyer, ex-army officer, and ex-Hollywood film editor who loves stories about females in danger who dig deep to solve problems and survive. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I marvel at the breadth of female styles–from delicate, feminine, and sweet to brave, adventuresome, and tough. I have edited films about various women characters, from Charlize Theron’s killer in Monster to Cate Blanchett’s spiritual medium in The Gift and Diane Lane’s brave romantic survivor in Under the Tuscan Sun. I have three successful step granddaughters: an accountant, a lawyer, and one getting a PhD in computer studies. Smart, talented, and interesting women people in my life.
I loved eight-year-old Viva’s struggle to connect with her entrancing but erratic mother, Charlotte. Viva is desperate to get away, partly because she’s afraid of becoming her mother. I was entranced with their endless, joyful, though stress-filled, hours together. I was delighted to see Viva find herself in her talent for dance.
And I was heartsick that Viva’s success paralleled Charlotte’s descent into drink as she faced the reality of her own failures as an artist. I rooted desperately for Viva to avoid her mother’s mistakes and take control of her life.
Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards, Silver Medal - Literary Fiction
Featured on PBS NewsHour
Named by Good Morning America, New York Post, and Los Angeles Daily News as one of the Best Books of Spring 2023
A deeply moving debut novel from the award-winning author of Yes, Yes, Cherries ("Funny, brave, and amazing"-Lorrie Moore) that explores the relationship complexities between mothers and daughters, the desire to escape, and the longing to connect. Viva has always found ways to manage her mother's impulsive, eccentric and addictive personality. She's had to-for her entire life,…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I’ve been drawing and writing ever since I could hold a pencil, and a big inspiration for me to start my lifelong creative journey were graphic novels. So even as an adult, I love to read work from a wide range of genres and age ranges to see what my fellow authors and artists are up to. Especially making my own middle grade graphic novel series, I look up to so many of the authors and artists on this list and chances are you and your kids will too if you pick one of these up!
Gale Galligan is another artist I’ve followed for a while now and it seems like everything they make just overflows with creativity and charm.
I love how Freestyle combines both dance and yo-yoing, two things I’d never think to put together, and makes it work so seamlessly. The book is just pure, vibrant, fun, and even as an adult I found myself going back and admiring the artwork and movement Gale portrays on every page. This is the kind of book that will have readers coming back again and again just to get wrapped up in its beautiful, vivid world.
From bestselling author, Gale Galligan, comes a fun, high-energy Graphic Novel about friendship, family, and school!
Cory's dance crew is getting ready for a major competition before they leave year nine. The crew captain gets increasingly intense about nailing the routine. And Cory's parents ground him for not taking his marks seriously.
He ends up with a new tutor, Sunna, who he dismisses as a boring nerd. until he catches her secretly practicing cool yo-yo tricks. As his friendship with Sunna grows, he ends up missing practice and bailing on his crew.
Dance has always been an important part of my life. I specialized in dance in college (Denison University) and graduate school (MFA, University of Michigan) and danced professionally for twelve years. As a dance educator, I’ve taught in colleges, conservatories, schools, and community centers, teaching toddlers, senior adults, and every age in between. I’ve authored two books for teachers, three picture books, articles in journals, and verses for children’s magazines. I share my passion for dance by writing and teaching, and visiting schools, libraries, and book festivals. I believe that every child should have the opportunity to participate in the arts; they are essential and transformational forces in our lives.
I love the variety of movement words in this book that offer children so many ideas about how to dance and what to dance about. It encourages children to dance however they want and offers playful prompts like emotions (dance because you’re happy or sad), different body parts (dance with your face or your fingers), and different places (dance at the bus stop!).
This book has colorful and fun illustrations by the author to enhance the lively movement ideas.
A playful picture book that urges readers to bop, bounce, and shake from the author of Fraidyzoo
There are so many ways to dance! You can jiggle or wiggle or stomp. You can bop or bounce or go completely nuts. You can dance at the market or the bus stop, with your fingers or your face. You can dance because you're happy or even because you're sad.
But, what's the best way to dance?
Exactly how you want to!
In How Do You Dance?, author-illustrator Thyra Heder explores dance in all of its creativity, humor, and-most of all-joy, in…
Dance has always been an important part of my life. I specialized in dance in college (Denison University) and graduate school (MFA, University of Michigan) and danced professionally for twelve years. As a dance educator, I’ve taught in colleges, conservatories, schools, and community centers, teaching toddlers, senior adults, and every age in between. I’ve authored two books for teachers, three picture books, articles in journals, and verses for children’s magazines. I share my passion for dance by writing and teaching, and visiting schools, libraries, and book festivals. I believe that every child should have the opportunity to participate in the arts; they are essential and transformational forces in our lives.
This colorful picture book, with whimsical illustrations by Maine Diaz, takes the reader on a journey through ten different kinds of dance from around the world. There are pictures of a widely diverse cast performing the dances, from Kuku to cha cha to disco to break dancing.
In addition, movement words like "glide," "dip," and "tap" will inspire children to dance along with the fun and playful words and illustrations.
This rhythmic showcase of dances from all over the world features children of diverse backgrounds and abilities tapping, spinning, and boogying away!
Tap, twirl, twist, spin! With musical, rhyming text, author Valerie Bolling shines a spotlight on dances from across the globe, while energetic art from Maine Diaz shows off all the moves and the diverse people who do them. From the cha cha of Cuba to the stepping of Ireland, kids will want to leap, dip, and zip along with the dances on the page!
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I’m an artist with an analytical mind. I love art and stories but I also love systems and processes. Ever since taking a class at art school about making pop-ups, I’ve been in love with paper engineering. It’s been the perfect synthesis of all my loves. There’s something fascinating about transforming an everyday object (paper) into something unexpected. Combined that with a great story and you have a magical experience! I like focusing my work on books for young readers (board books - picture books) because it gives adults and kids an opportunity to interact with each other and build memories.
I grew up loving animation and was captivated by how putting drawings together could create an illusion of life.
This wordless picture book somehow captures that awe with its interactive tabs. By flipping the tabs throughout the book, the characters move and feel like they are being animated.
I love that the story is a dance between Flora and her flamingo friend, literally and figuratively, as they have a disagreement. Everything about this book is well thought out—the interactive mechanisms really enhance the story. Additionally, the drawings are just so beautiful. It’s simply fantastic!
In this innovative wordless picture book with interactive flaps, Flora and her graceful flamingo friend explore the trials and joys of friendship through an elaborate synchronized dance. With a twist, a turn, and even a flop, these unlikely friends learn at last how to dance together in perfect harmony. Full of humor and heart, this stunning performance (and splashy ending!) will have readers clapping for more of this fun flamingo story!
For more feathery fun with the flamingo girls, pick up more preschool wordless books like Flora and the Penguin, Flora and the Peacocks, Flora and the Chicks, Flora and…
