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Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
is a 2013 book focusing on the history of the
Black Panthers
. It is written by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin.
Reception
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General public reviews
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Writing in 2013 for the
Los Angeles Times
,
Hector Tobar
describes
Black Against Empire
as an "authoritative if flawed new history" whose "most important contribution... is simply to treat the Black Panthers as the serious political and cultural force they were." As "the most dramatic failing in
Black Against Empire
", Tobar points to "the authors' lack of critical distance from their subject" which produces images of "Panther leaders who are, for the most part, idealists without noticeable flaws."
[1]
Academic reviews
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Writing for
Reviews in American History
in 2014, Jama Lazerow applauds
Black Against Empire
as the first authoritative account of the Black Panthers. At the same time, Lazerow notes that one key problem for
Black Against Empire
is the weak coverage of the Panthers in serious scholarly discourse to this point: "we now have local studies of nearly two dozen communities, but most of that work has not come from historians and is often of dubious quality. The absence of reliable work may explain why the authors typically write in depth only about the places that produced the most sensational events: the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and New Haven."
[2]
References
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