With few exceptions, traditional accounts of the development of the modern world put European history at the center of everything, often focusing on the “Age of Discovery” and global expansion, the Enlightenment, and so on. “The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story,” as Howard W. French asserts in his critically acclaimed and game-changing new book. “What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?”

In this segment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc talks with French about his new book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, and about the forcibly forgotten history of Africa’s central place in the making of the modern world. Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and former New York Times bureau chief in the Caribbean and Central America, West and Central Africa, Tokyo, and Shanghai. He is the author of numerous books, including A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.

Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Tuesday and Friday on TRNN.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Stephen Frank

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Marc Steiner

Host, The Marc Steiner Show
Marc Steiner is the host of "The Marc Steiner Show" on TRNN. He is a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has spent his life working on social justice issues. He walked his first picket line at age 13, and at age 16 became the youngest person in Maryland arrested at a civil rights protest during the Freedom Rides through Cambridge. As part of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, Marc helped organize poor white communities with the Young Patriots, the white Appalachian counterpart to the Black Panthers. Early in his career he counseled at-risk youth in therapeutic settings and founded a theater program in the Maryland State prison system. He also taught theater for 10 years at the Baltimore School for the Arts. From 1993-2018 Marc's signature “Marc Steiner Show” aired on Baltimore’s public radio airwaves, both WYPR—which Marc co-founded—and Morgan State University’s WEAA.
 
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