Rodney Louis Tompkins has narrated 28 audiobooks on Listento.it by 25 authors, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
Origin of the Negro Race
Summary
Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) was a Welsh explorer and journalist. Famous for his meeting with the missionary and explorer David Livingstone, Stanley searched for the source of the Nile as an agent of King Leopold II of Belgium. In Origin of the Negro Race, he attempts an ethnographic description of the continent’s people beginning with Egypt and the North. Then follows West Africa and the Niger basin, where the Hausa, Yoruba, Mandingo, Kanuri, and Baghermi people live. Then he considers Eastern and Southern Africa from the Southern Sudan to the Southern Coast of the continent, describing the Nuba, Shilluk, and Dinka, Congo peoples like the Bakongo, Bateke, and Barotse, and the Zulu to the southeast. He states that the inhabitants of the East Coast share a culture with Arabian and Indian peoples settled around the Indian Ocean. Morton also describes Africa’s ancient peoples of short stature who live in the central rain forests and to the south in the Cape Colony.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
Twelve Years a Slave
Summary
Twelve Years a Slave is the 1853 narrative of former slave Solomon Northup. He was born free in New York and kidnapped and sold into slavery. It was famously adapted for film in 2013.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
The Jews of Africa
Summary
Sidney Mendelssohn (-1917) was a diamond merchant in South Africa who retired in England to devote his leisure to public work, the collection of his library of works on South Africa and the compilation of his famed bibliography based on that collection. In his 1920 book The Jews of Africa, Mendelssohn attempts to chart the separate and progressive histories of the Jews in the different parts of Africa where they lived since their expulsion from the land by the Romans. He succeeds in compiling a narrative of a large part of the histories of the Jews of Africa during the centuries following the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
Tribes of Israel in America
Summary
View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America is an 1823 book by Ethan Smith, a Congregationalist minister, who argued that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The lost 10 tribes were believed to have disappeared after being taken captive by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Smith's speculation was inspired by the apocryphal book II Esdras 13:41, which claims that the ten tribes settled in a far country, "where never mankind dwelt." Far from purporting to be holy writ, View of the Hebrews attempts to solve a puzzle of history. In itself, it’s an interesting listen which offers fascinating insight into the language and perspectives of the US in the 1820s.
Public Domain (P)2019 Museum Audiobooks
The Negro in Ancient History
Summary
Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) was a diplomat, educator, writer and politician. Born in the West Indies, he migrated to Liberia in 1851. Blyden’s writings on pan-Africanism were influential in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the two countries founded in the time of slavery for the resettlement of free blacks from the United Kingdom and the United States. Blyden believed that Zionism was a model for what he termed Ethiopianism, and that African-Americans could return to Africa and redeem it. In 1869, Blyden published The Negro in Ancient History, a work of 25 pages with the aim of "opening the eyes of black people to see their true mission and destiny, to escape from the house of bondage to their ancestral home, and assist in building a Christian African empire."
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
The Moors in Spain
Summary
The Moors in Spain is an overview of the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Stanley Edward Lane-Poole (1854 - 1931), the author, was a noted British archaeologist.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
The Cushite
Summary
Rufus L. Perry was an educator and Baptist minister from Brooklyn, New York. He was a member of the African Civilization Society and was a co-founder of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. The Cushite is a short work that investigates the history of the ancient peoples.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
The Souls of Black Folk
Summary
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois is a landmark in sociology and a cornerstone of African American literature. The book comprises various essays on race, some of which had previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. As an uncompromising advocate of civil rights, Du Bois stated that through work, culture, and liberty, the dual heritage of African Americans could be melded into a force for positive social and cultural change. Du Bois promoted the idea of a synthesis of racial and national consciousness dedicated to “the ideal of human brotherhood” as set out in The Souls of Black Folk, which makes it one of the most influential works of African American literature in the 20th century.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks