num_pages: 368
description: <p><P>At the greatest moments and in the cruelest times, black women have been a crucial part of America's history.&#160;&#160;Now, the inspiring history of black women in America is explored in vivid detail by two leaders in the fields of African American and women's history.<P><b>A Shining Thread of Hope</b> chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South to the triumphs of the Civil Rights era, and it illustrates how the story of black women in America is as much a tale of courage and hope as it is a history of struggle.&#160;&#160;On both an individual and a collective level, <b>A Shining Thread of Hope</b> reveals the strength and spirit of black women and brings their stories from the fringes of American history to a central position in our understanding of the forces and events that have shaped this country.</p><h3>Library Journal</h3><p>In an extraordinary narrative personalized for easy reading, Hine (Michigan State Univ.), perhaps the leading historian of U.S. black women, and Thompson, editor-in-chief of Facts on File's Encyclopedia of Black Women (LJ 4/15/97), convey the plight and pluck of African American women from their arrival at Jamestown, VA, in 1619 to what the authors describe as a new era at the dawn of the year 2000. Celebrating black women's historical strength, Hine and Thompson accentuate resistance and survival in their 12 chapters. They focus on flesh-and-blood women whose stories of persistence, protest, and progress flow together with famous and unfamiliar names sharing an unbreakable thread spun by faithful and industrious self-reliance. Without peer as a single-volume history of being black and female in America, this book is an inviting opening to the fast-growing scholarship on African American women to which Hine has so richly contributed. Highly recommended for collections on blacks, women, or U.S. history. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/97.]Brenda M. Brock, Univ. at Buffalo, NY, & Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe</p>
language: en
title: A Shining Thread of Hope
publisher: Broadway Books