Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Connect with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a noted contributor to Encyclopaedia Britannica online. Read Britannica's biography of Henry Louis Gates Jr.

BIOGRAPHY

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored 22 books and created 18 documentary films. The recipient of 55 honorary degrees, Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Primary Contributions (1)

Monuments of Hope, Memorials to a Poisoned Past

Looking back at the revolution in democracy that began during the American Civil War and continued during Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois, the preeminent black intellectual of the 20th century, lamented how short-lived the experiment turned out to be. Du Bois himself had been born less than three…

Publications (8)

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (October 2017)

By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The first edition of Joel Augustus Rogers’s now legendary 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, published in 1934, was billed as “A Negro ‘Believe It or Not.’” Rogers’s little book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogers’s was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing...

The African Americans Many Rivers to Cross (February 2016)

By Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Yacovone

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is the companion book to the six-part, six-hour documentary of the same name, which aired on national, prime-time public television in the fall of 2013. The series is the first to air since 1968 that chronicles the full sweep of 500 years of African American history, from the origins of slavery on the African continent and the arrival of the first black conquistador, Juan Garrido, in Florida in 1513, through five centuries of remarkable historic...

Life Upon These Shores Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 (2011)

By Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama.

Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images--ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure....

Black in Latin America (July 2011)

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Selected as a 2012 Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries

12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest—over ten and a half million—were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere,...

Faces of America How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts (July 2010)

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Explores the family trees and genealogical identity of 12 of America's most extraordinary people

As a nation of immigrants, the American experience is vibrantly defined by the diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious heritage of its people. Perhaps because so many of their ancestors migrated to this country relatively recently, Americans are especially concerned with their family trees, carving out personal histories by combing through documents such as wills and estate records,...

Wonders of the African World (2001)

By Henry Louis Gates

The Companion Volume to the PBS Television Series

Wonders of the African World is an exuberant, visually stunning journey across Africa and through the history of its glorious but forgotten civilizations.

Traveling by camel, by dhow, by Land Cruiser, and on foot, the renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., takes us to twelve countries in search of Africa's magnificent past, the now neglected civilizations that in their day were as grand and sophisticated as any on the face of the...

Colored People A Memoir (April 1995)

By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation.

A winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant...

The Signifying Monkey A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988)

By Henry Louis Gates

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black...

More Notable Contributors