John Hope Franklin Research Paper

Superior Essays
John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin was a highly admired American historian and social activist, he is best known for his scholarship that focused on Southern history and racial politics. His groundbreaking work, From Slavery to Freedom, was first released in 1947 and sold more than three million copies worldwide and with many other titles to follow (Yarrow). Apart from being an historian and author, Franklin was also former president for many honor societies, including Phi Beta Kappa, Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. In order to recognize his contribution to society and culture in the United States, Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor in
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Knopf to write a history of African Americans. But Franklin, at the time was engaged in research on the South’s militant culture and thus rejected the request. However, Franklin was later convinced to write the book after the repeated requests by the editor who even visited him once in North Carolina. The book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, now in its ninth printing has sold more than three million copies worldwide since its appearing in 1947, and has been translated into multiple languages, including French, Indian, German, Chinese, and Japanese. The work became and remained the preeminent history of African Americans since its initial publication, it is a great reference exploring the contributions and experience of African Americans in the history of the United States. The book complemented the country’s changing intellectual climate and growing sentiment for equal rights for blacks. It legitimized the academic study of African American history and remains “the Bible of the field” …show more content…
The book exposed earlier historical fallacies about this era. Franklin provided many interesting insights into the period of American history that has often been neglected in many other history books. Franklin outlined the several stages of reconstruction, including the introducing of racial segregation by the confederate dominated governments that passed the Emancipation Proclamation, the reaction of congress, and the KKK group growing in the south. In the book, he wrote that the end of Reconstruction reforms left “the South more than ever attached to the values and outlook that had shaped its history” (Franklin). Other titles followed, including The Emancipation Proclamation in 1963 and the Antebellum North in 1976. The book, Racial Equality in America that was based on his National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture confronted the country’s persistent disparity between the goal of racial equality and the facts of discrimination. The book is composed of three lectures that was given in three different cities, in which Franklin chronicled the history of race in the United States from revolutionary times to 1976

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