THIS WEBSITE CONCENTRATES ON BRITAIN, AND THE BLACK PRESENCE 1830-1930. MANY PUBLICATIONS WITH STRANDS OF BLACK BRITISH HISTORY CAN BE OVERLOOKED AS THEY WERE CLASSIFIED AS ‘AFRICAN’, ‘AFRICAN-AMERICAN’ AND ‘CARIBBEAN’. THE BUILDING YOUR LIBRARY PAGES PICK BOOKS PUBLISHED IN THE 20TH CENTURY WHICH ARE STILL AVAILABLE, AS USED COPIES, THROUGH WEBSITES SUCH AS ABE BOOKS. PRICES INDICATED IN THESE PAGES ARE FROM SUCH SITES, AND EXCLUDE POSTAGE. THE REDUCTION IN SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOPS AND MODERN COMPUTER-AIDED CATALOGUES SUGGEST THAT THOSE SEEKING TO BUILD THEIR OWN LIBRARIES MIGHT BENEFIT FROM BUILDING YOUR LIBRARY PAGES. 

Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes (University of Chicago Press, 1998) details three Tswana leaders and their servants who visited forty-two British towns in 1895. The multiple comments in British newspapers and the cuttings that are in Gaborone and Molepolole in Botswana (copies are in Oxford University) make this history of African visitors who attracted enormous public interest a well-balanced account, not a triumph of white imperialism. 320 pages and 36 illustrations, originally priced at £15.25 paperback, £39.95 hardback, in early 2020 it is available for £12.00.

Index to Building Your Library

#  1         Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen. Tswana 1895

#  2         Nancy Cunard

#  3         Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson

#  4         Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

#  5         Brew family of Ghana and London

#  6         Booker T Washington; Chief Alfred Sam

#  7         Wellesley Cole, Kossoh Town Boy and An Innocent in Britain

#  8         Ira Aldridge

#  9         Paul Robeson, Negro, 1927

# 10       The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol 1

# 11       Jomo Kenyatta

# 12       Langston Hughes The Big Sea (1940) and Rampersad’s biography 1986, 1988

# 13       Percy Chen, China Called Me

# 14       Stimela Jingoes (Lesotho) recalled France in 1917; Herbert Julian Black Eagle memoir of a Trinidad aeroplane fanatic trained in 1910s England

# 15       Thomas L. Johnson, Twenty-eight Years a Slave (Bournemouth 1909)

# 16       Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion (1966).