Published in 1883, George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America was the first comprehensive scholarly history of African Americans written by a Black historian. Volume 2 covers Black Americans as enslaved people, as soldiers in the Civil War, and as citizens during Reconstruction, drawing on primary sources, government records, and personal testimony to produce a rigorous account of an under-documented history.
Williams’s work broke new ground both intellectually and culturally, insisting on the centrality of African American experience to the full story of the United States. This free EPUB download offers a clean, readable edition of a foundational text in American historiography.