David Levering Lewis

Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s - and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale - and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble.

Harlem was a development, a developer's dream and a place where residents had more space and more amenities than ever before. The subway reached 145th street about 1904, and it seemed that Harlem's destiny was to become largely a preserve of successful ethnics relocating and arriving. Then, overnight, the bust took place.

It was clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of the early 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of the steel workers, that that was a watershed.

The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement.

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.

The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about.

I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.

Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.

A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

There was a very famous leader in Atlanta who thought that education was appropriate, but on the whole, the view was, 'If you're going to keep people down, you have to keep them ignorant. And so, nothing personal, but we just don't want to recognize the attributes that man of learning would bring. Quite threatening, those would be.'

The education business is a little murky because by 1900, it has been pretty well decided that a certain amount of education was required to make the system of repression work. You had to have people who showed up punctually. You had to have people who took their orders obediently and understand them fully.