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A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson. (New York: Broadway, 1998. x, 355 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-7679-0110-X.)
A Shining Thread of Hope represents the first general history of African American women--an astonishing fact given the thirty-year existence of the field of women's history and the large number of studies of black women that have appeared in recent years. But this survey is well worth the wait, for it provides a highly readable, comprehensive account that includes historiographical debates. The bibliography and endnotes demonstrate that this is a solid synthesis of current scholarship. Indeed, it may ultimately become a classic for black women's history, comparable to John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom (1947).
This survey is an exemplary model of the...