"If you believe people have no history worth mentioning, it's easy to believe they have no humanity worth defending." — William Loren Katz
January 26, 2008.
The official site of William Loren Katz
Site highlights Celebrating a Victory for Freedom
December 24th, 2007 marks the 170th anniversary of the U.S. government's first significant military defeat in its first foreign incursion. The place was Florida, then a Spanish colony. The foe was a united force of Africans, on the run from the south's slave plantations, and Seminoles, whose self-determination was endangered. The runaway Africans had been establishing prosperous, self-governing communities in the peninsula since 1738. During the American Revolution they merged with Seminole Indians into a multicultural nation that cultivated crops according to techniques learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. Out of this came an alliance that shaped effective diplomatic and military responses to invaders and slavecatchers... {Read this essay} {More essays}
Also on the site
Apperances:Katz in New York and Ohio
During Black History Month, William Loren Katz will be presenting on Black Indians and The Black West at District-37, Bard College, Oberlin Heritage Center and NYU Metro Center.
Current Events:Waterboarding and U.S. History
Some high U.S. officials claim not be aware of it, and Judge Michael Mukasey, the President's choice for attorney general, prefers to equivocate, but water boarding has long been a form of torture that causes excruciating pain and can lead to death. It forces water into prisoner's lungs, usually over and over again. The Spanish Inquisition in the late 1400s used this torture to uncover and punish heretics, and then in the early 1500s Spain's inquisitors carried it overseas to root out heresy in the New World... Read more essays
Lectures: Listen to Katz on The Leonard Lopate Show
Prints: African Print Collection
For more than forty years as he wrote 40 highly praised books on African American history, William Loren Katz was also able to collect 250 fascinating antique engravings of African life from the 17th to the 19th centuries. His complete "African Print Collection" is now offered for sale.
Books: Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage
Though they have never appeared in a school text, Hollywood movie or a TV show of the Old West, Black Indians were there as sure as Sitting Bull, Davy Crockett and Geronimo. Their story began at the time of Columbus, ranged from North American forests to South American jungles, and the jewel-like islands of the Caribbean. Through careful research and rare antique prints and photographs, this book reveals how black and red people learned to live and work together in the Americas to oppose white oppression... More books
Recommended resource: Journal of African Civilizations
Founded in 1979, Ivan Van Seritma's Journal of African Civilizations is "the only historical journal in the English-speaking world which focuses on the heartland rather than on the periphery of African civilizations."
