Identifies stereotypes used to support racism, examines the misconception that Blacks had been stripped of their cultural heritage by slavery, and shows the influence of African culture on modern Black America.

This new edition, published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding by Melville Herskovits of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, brings back into print one of the classics in scholarly analysis and translation, written by one of the cultural anthropology. When this book was first published in 1958, Melville luminaries of American Herskovits, with his wife and collaborator, Frances, had spent over Twenty years studying the social networks, language, and oral traditions of the peoples of West Africa and their descendants in the New World. Dahomey, the...