Jonathan Holloway’s book has been named one of the 2014 American Book Award winners by the Before Columbus Foundation

Jonathan Holloway’s book Jim Crow Wisdom:  Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)) has been named one of the 2014 American Book Award winners by the Before Columbus Foundation.  The book uses social science, documentary film, dance, popular literature, museums, memoirs, and the tourism trade to explore “the stories black Americans have told about their past and why these stories are vital to understanding a modern black identity.”  The book adopts a novel strategy of interweaving first-person and family memories with a more traditional third-person historical perspective.  In the process, it confronts the issue of “the value of history and facts when memories do violence to both.