First of all, reading Pero Dagbovie’s What is African American History? has been an eye-opener regarding the historiographical struggles and the methodological and conceptual aspects of doing African American history properly. While I have come across some of Dagbovie’s work before, and covered parts of the historical fight to integrate the history curriculum in primary and secondary schools during the mid-twentieth century in my M.A. thesis, I gained a lot of new insight by reading Dagbovie’s illustration of the coming of age of the field and the various debates along the way. His work made me think harder about what African American history is, and what it is not. This has helped me a lot in developing and redirecting my own research focus over the last couple of months. I think that sometimes the scarcity of Black sources or the difficulties to access them, compared to white official and public records, can increase the danger to fall back into narrating the story …show more content…
More than any other historiographical book I have read, Dagbovie’s account provides important insight by recounting some of the central debates that have shaped the production of African American history over the last decades. I think a still often downplayed part in historiography is that differences are often not only grounded in professional disagreements, but also in long-standing personal power struggles. Dagbovie’s presentation of the long and complicated struggle to get African American History recognized as a field of its own, fought out over several generations, in which African American historians, including you, added to my understanding of the various currents of historical