This paper will discuss certain aspects of African American history. The first part of the paper will provide some background with regard to the history of Africa and its culture. The second part of the paper will briefly discuss the chronological history of African Americans, focusing especially upon the transition from slavery to freedom in the Nineteenth Century. The third part of the paper will discuss African American literature, including that produced during the Harlem Renaissance. The fourth part of the paper will discuss the African roots of jazz and the early development of jazz in African American culture.
Most scientists now trace the geographical origins of humans to Africa; thus, the African continent has been populated by humans for a few million years (Bohannan & Curtin, 1988, pp. 214-18). Relatively little is known about the evolutionary stages between the stone age and the Roman period in Africa. What is known is that the process of technological evolution in Africa was slower than that in Europe and Asia, so that by the middle of the second millennium A.D. African cultures were not as technologically advanced as their European and Asian neighbors. As a result, the African cultures came to be dominated by the European ones as world trade increased in the Fifteenth Century (Curtin, 1974, pp. 24-31).
African states began to develop with the introduction of techniques for producing iron, which aided in the advancement of hunting and agricultural techniques, as well as warfare. These techniques spread with the migration of Bantu-speaking peoples throughout the first millenniums B.C. and A.D. Bantu-speakers eventually populated a region extending from the Benue-Niger confluence and the mouth of the Tana River in the north to the southern extreme of the continent, excepting areas in the southern zone, facing the Atlantic (which were populated by the San and the Khoikhoi peoples). The earliest known kingdo...