This study of "The Children of Ham in America" is an investigation into the nineteenth-century uses of the myth of Ham. Because Ham was perceived to be the ancestor of the Negro race, Ham was the key to articulating a Negro past that was ancient and dignified. For instance, the …
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This study examines African American anti-colonial rhetoric during the Great Depression in order better to understand international dimensions of domestic political expression and the complexity of U.S. black American rhetorical culture. I argue that colonial interpretations of …
For many indigenous African cultures, music serves more as a verb than a noun. Music has been used in various forms for spiritual ceremonies, political information dissemination and entertainment for many social celebrations. It is with awareness of the potency of music that thi…
Much of the literature on the Nation of Islam has highlighted the sectarian features of this African American Islamic community. Some expert commentators argue that the Nation of Islam is not even an Islamic group. Almost all of the studies written by both Muslims and non-Muslim…
This study proposes to conduct a critical examination of the emergence of the American-educated Kenyan elites (the Asomi ) in the period between 1900 to 1963, and their role in the nationalist movement and eventually their Africanization of the Civil and Private sectors in Kenya…
This dissertation explores the historical connections among fourteen ethnic groups in southwestern Tanzania's Rukwa and Mbeya regions. In this territory between lakes Tanganyika and Nyasa, Bantu migrants began to settle as early as 2500 years ago. The historical evidence is deri…
This Project Demonstrating Excellence (dissertation) presents the results of an historical comparative study on the women in the Nation of Islam (NOI). As such, it examines two periods of their history--from 1930 to 1975, termed "The First," founded by Master Wallace Fard Muhamm…
The Nation of Islam's relationship to Islam has followed a unique path from its inception as a black separatist movement to its integration into the worldwide Islamic community, as well as into its own American community. The pilgrimage has not been an easy one, but it follows t…
Former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was one of the most controversial public figures in the United States in the 1960s. His family life and childhood in segregated Louisville, Kentucky shaped him to become a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI) by his late teens. His …
Islam has become firmly rooted in America. Although there are no American religious history texts that affirm its presence, Islam as a power/knowledge base is manifesting that presence throughout this society. Nearly every major American city has several Muslim communities, shop…
The contemporary state of Protestant African-American churches indicates a low awareness of where they are presently situated in a religiously plural society. This has resulted in the churches' seeming inability to meet the new challenges of Islamic growth within the African-Ame…
The purpose of this study is to discern the religious aspects of the life of Malcolm X, and to demonstrate how religious motivations were intrinsic to, and inseparable from, his work within the Nation of Islam, as well as an independent leader. A religious biography, this study …
The Nation of Islam's shift to Islam resulted in the creation of the World Community of Al-Islam in the West (WCIW) and the propagation of the religion on a scale unwitnessed in American history. The Bilalian News was essential to the WCIW's efforts to spread Islam. However, lik…
This study analyzes the black image as it was portrayed in print and visual culture within the framework of "American Orientalism" in the nineteenth-century. By American Orientalism (a phrase obviously inspired by Edward Said's classic study), I mean the larger framework of raci…
A prominent Mediterranean port located near Islamic territories, the city of Valencia in the fifteenth century boasted a slave population of pronounced religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity. While previous historians have focused their energies on defining the legal status o…
This dissertation is a study of Islamic Hausa women in the West African Republics of Nigeria and Niger and the unique roles they played in shaping, even at times defining, modern Hausa culture. The study begins in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a point of time which…
Utilizing Afrocentric thought, this dissertation examines digital Pan-Africanism as a new theory that demonstrates the liberatory potential of digital technology including internet-based writing and businesses. Focusing on the burgeoning Black travel industry, it specifically co…
This dissertation is an attempt to broaden the historical analysis of the Social Gospel movement by using public housing as its entry point of inquiry. It begins with the question: how does one attempt to write American Church History in the post-modern period? This entry point …
Between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, black Christian congregations increasingly commissioned art that incorporated references to Africa, African American history, a black Jesus, and political leaders. The new church art had several precedents from the late nineteenth centur…