“A Faithful Account of the Race" charts the emergence of a genre that Stephen Hall identifies as African American historical writing. Importantly though, Hall’s book goes beyond merely offering a genealogy of “race histories.” Instead, he links this literary form to the professionalization of black historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing this, Hall presents a way of reading historical writing from African-descended peoples in America across time, place, and region. This kind of approach encourages the reclassification of Mariah Stewart as an African American historian, along with the more formal ‘father’ of black history, Carter G. Woodson.”
--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
“Highly recommended.”
--Choice
“Stephen G. Hall’s A Faithful Account of the Race challenges the assumption that African American history as a field of study was either founded by Carter Woodson or W.E.B. DuBois or was the product of the civil rights and black power movements. Hall shows how early national and nineteenth –century African American thinkers had already written extensively about their own history in formal historical works as well as in pamphlets, newspapers, and other texts not conventionally defined as histories.”
--Journal of American History
“Thoroughly grounded in primary evidence and recent scholarship, Hall’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of the forces shaping American intellectual life and historical study.”
--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
" Hall's unique literary historical method uncovers a tremendously important history that impressively broadens the way we think about obscure and well-known figures. Hall's history not only revises mainstream American history; it also revises African American history.... Hall's book will, doubtless become required reading in African American and Africana curriculums."
--American Quarterly