BLACKS IN AMERICA

This selective, chrono-topical guide "to the subject matter and literature of black history and culture" is more comprehensive, somewhat more up-to-date, much more evaluative, and certainly no less anthoritative than Fisher's revision of Miller's The Negro in America (1970) or Homer and Swartout's Books About the Negro (also 1970), two of the most useful general black bibliographies around. The McPherson et al. guide, which offers self-contained, interdisciplinary bibliographic essays on 100 broad topics (slave revolts, Jim Crow, Marxist historians on Black Reconstruction, soul music, Black Power), is very much a Princeton production: all but one of the five authors teach there, most of the books and articles cited can be found in the University library, and the guide grew out of a Princeton undergraduate seminar on black life in America. This should be particularly helpful as a curriculum pi:tuning aid in the black studies area on both the secondary and university levels; moreover, it successfully complements such standard lists as Work's famous bibliography and the invaluable dictionary catalog of New York Public's Schomburg collection. For the moment at least, Blacks in America must be considered the best one-volume bibliographic guide to black literature available.