Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/506

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
452
Journal of Negro History

the revival of the Democratic party through the leadership of Cleveland, industrial unrest, political schism, the Spanish-American War, business in politics, the career of Theodore Roosevelt, government control, insurgency, the rise of Woodrow Wilson, watchful waiting, neutrality and preparedness, the United States in the World War, and the League of Nations. Some attention is also given to the reconstruction and the election of 1920.

While the work is a valuable treatise from the point of view of a man who is trying to write the history of a particular race, it does not come up to the standard of history of the United States in all of its national and racial ramifications. So far as the Negro is concerned, it merely refers to his undoing as a political factor in the Reconstruction, the efforts for his education by northern sympathizers, the rise of Booker T. Washington, the elimination of the Negro as a factor in the South, the efforts to pass a force bill protecting the Negro in the exercise of the right of suffrage, and the continued control of the South of the Democratic party. A foreigner who reads this work might wonder whether the Negroes by this political upheaval have been exterminated or have emigrated from the country. Any student of the history of the whole Southland knows that it is centered largely around the Negro and any historian failing to take this into account cannot be recognized as an authority.

The Backbone of Africa. A Record of Travel during the Great War, with some Suggestions for Administrative Reform. By Sir Alfred Sharpe, K.C.M.G., C.B., formerly Governor of Nyasaland. London, H. F. & G. Witherby, 1921. Pp.232.

This is the reaction of a public functionary to the scenes of colonial life as they appeared to him from a different angle in a survey of the whole continent and under the circumstances of a political upheaval. He had in mind here the regions of Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Ruanda, the Congo, and the Upper Nile. The book is illustrated, well written and suggestive throughout. It contains four valuable maps and has an index largely of names.

Writing from the point of view of the exploiter of Africa, the author considers such questions as the disposition of the German Colonies coming into the possession of England at the close of the Great War, the question of restitution, the partition of Africa, the suggested union of the Protectorates in Eastern Africa under a