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African Life Stories

This course uses the stories of people's lives - memoirs, biographies, and oral histories - to study the history of the African continent. Some historians assume that the only "legitimate' sources for historical knowledge are archival documents. In contrast, this course insists that history is fundamentally a craft of story tellers. Through this lens, we will study the craft of writing a life story in the African context. What's in a life? What does it mean to record and narrate the story of someone else's life?

JSTOR

Indexes key scholarship in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.  Contains significant full text of books, book chapters, journal articles book reviews, pamphlets, and many primary sources.