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Readings in African History

African history is a difficult field: the continent is home to many very different peoples for most of whom ancient written resources are very rare, so that until very recently there has been almost no one to speak for Africa in her own voice: this only began to change in the twentieth century. When you factor in that many 20c resources remain firmly under copyright, making many of those works irreproducible on the Internet, please be generous and give me an out! I do hope to add more, little by little.

For now, in roughly chronological order, this is what I have to offer:

	Readings in Egyptian History: My orientation page to several resources on ancient Egyptian history: Manetho, Plutarch, Hirtius' Alexandrian War (all source texts), and Bevan's excellent The House of Ptolemy. [ 2 books, 642 pages of print presented in 34 webpages — and other material ]
	The African War: probably not by Julius Caesar, but almost certainly by one of his partisans in the civil war, the book recounts Caesar's African campaign in 47‑46 B.C. (To what extent this is African history rather than European history taking place in Africa is another matter, of course.) [ 161 pages of print in 8 webpages: with 3 maps ]
	Cities in the Sand • Leptis Magna and Sabratha in Roman Africa (1957) is a commented photographic record of Lepcis Magna, Sabratha, and more generally Roman Tripolitania, the central coastal area of modern Libya. Some of the photos are of added value since there have been changes to the ancient sites, not all for the better. [ 56 pages of print in 6 webpages: 98 photographs and 2 maps ]
	North African historian Muhammad al‑Idrisi's Description of Africa (and Spain) in Dozy and De Goeje's translation covers only part of Idrisi's Geography: Equatorial, Saharan, and North Africa — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. 🇫🇷 In French. [ 266 pages of print in 8 webpages ]
	Ray Irwin's The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers is a detailed history of the first interaction of the United States with the Moslem world as it developed in North Africa; told from an American point of view. [ 214 pages of print in 15 webpages with 4 illustrations ]
	The history of the British overseas territory of Tristan da Cunha, like the island itself, is hard to fit anywhere; 2800 km from the nearest continent, it sits in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean — but that nearest continent is Africa, and genetically, its people are partly of native African origin. [ 11/26/20: 2 books and other material: 79 webpages — 482 pages of print, 1 map, 22 photos, 2 other images ]
	Yet another case of essentially European history being fought out in Africa rather than actual African history, but George Ward Price's Giraud and the African Scene tells a story that played out in Algeria and Tunisia and is thus not altogether irrelevant to the history of colonial North Africa: the Free French war effort during World War II. [ 282 pages of print in 14 webpages with 6 photos and 1 map ]
	A few journal articles, newspaper articles, and the like will also be forthcoming. For now, just one: Barbary Pirates (an entry in the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica).

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