Senior Editor, HuffPost - Philip Lewis
From the African Slave Trade to Seneca Village to Biddy Mason and more, The Humanity Archive is a very enriching read on the history of Blackness around the world. I was hooked by Fowler's storytelling and would recommend others who want to pore over a book that outlines critical moments in history—without putting you to sleep.
Vanity Fair
Fowler sees historical storytelling and the sharing of knowledge as a vocation and a means of fostering empathy and understanding between cultures. A deft storyteller with a sonorous voice, Fowler's passion for his material is palpable as he unfurls the hidden histories.
From the African Slave Trade to Seneca Village to Biddy Mason and more, The Humanity Archive is a very enriching read on the history of Blackness around the world. I was hooked by Fowler's storytelling and would recommend others who want to pore over a book that outlines critical moments in history—without putting you to sleep.
MAY 2023 - AudioFile
This is not a passive listen--narrator Jermaine Fowler commands the attention of his audience. His audiobook is a detailed consideration of Black history with a focus on how the American public has learned a deliberately curated story in order to promote a sanitized version. Listeners who only recently learned of the Tulsa Massacre and are wondering what else they haven't been accurately taught will find Fowler's audiobook to be an excellent source of information. He provides an unflinching account of multiple atrocities against Black people. Yet his premise shines through: The intellectually rigorous audiobook is ultimately about humanity and how an accurate understanding of history can move us forward. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-12-08
An innovative reading of Black history, gracefully joining it to the larger history of all humankind.
As podcaster and “self-proclaimed intellectual adventurer” Fowler observes at the beginning of this rich book, there’s irony in the fact that the founder of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson, believed we should study not Black history as such but “Black people in history.” It’s a subtle distinction, but nearly a century later, Woodson’s vision “sits in the bargain bin of education, the place a thing goes after losing its value—its essence, its very soul.” That Woodson is not better known supports Fowler’s vigorous program of prowling the stacks to look at pioneering literature and those who kept it alive—people such as Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, who gathered thousands of books on Black life, and Lerone Bennett Jr., whose 1962 book Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America “mainstreamed 1619 as the most important date in Black American history.” Fowler consistently turns up intriguing surprises. For example, the model for the kneeling figure in the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., who escaped from slavery in 1863, was the great-great-great grandfather of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and the first donation for the memorial, dedicated in 1922, came from a formerly enslaved woman—ironic, again, since the memorial highlights not the enslaved but Abraham Lincoln, a Whitewashing of history that devalues Black Americans’ vital role in their own liberation. Drawing on the work of Orlando Patterson in the project of joining the particular to the universal, Fowler examines slavery as a worldwide phenomenon. “If we look back on such an all-pervasive human institution and assume we are incapable of committing such atrocities ourselves, we will fail to prevent it in the future,” he writes. Given revanchist White supremacism and its insistence “that slavery was benign,” what remains is to counter untruthful narratives through constant self-education and well-formed knowledge, which Fowler accomplishes in this book.
A timely, powerful approach to history that looks into the past to find a path into a better future.