A thousand years before Christ the Queen of Sheba, we are told, traveled to Jerusalem where she met King Solomon, married him and had a son, Menelik. When Menelik reached maturity, it’s said that he returned to Ethiopia taking with him the Ark of the Covenant containing the original 10 commandments. The Ethiopian Christian [...]
No one knows for sure. But a few things seem clear. This is how it began. By 1400, the Christians of Europe had been fighting the forces of Islam for centuries, in a series of wars called Crusades. The Prophet Muhammad lived in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century AD. Towards the end of his life, and long after his [...]
Dr. Ronald Mallett is building a time machine. He is a theoretical physicist who received his doctorate from Penn State and who is now based at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Mallett first conceived the idea to build a time machine at the age of 10. His father was a television repairman who lived [...]
The uplifting, inspiring, empowering music of Bob Marley is to Dancehall what the rousing, revolutionary music of Public Enemy is to the pop tunes that dominate hip hop today. . . Bob Marley took the words, beliefs and rhythms of the Rastafarian movement and brought them to the Jamaican public, the American public and ultimately to the entire world. Freedom fighters [...]
Have you ever heard of the Gullah people of South Carolina? They are also called Geechies. The word “Gullah” is short for the “Gola” people of Angola, and “Geechie” refers to the “Gidzi” people of Sierra Leone. Many of the inhabitants of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and northern [...]
In the 1960s, with the rising tide of Black consciousness, it was seen as a denigration of our African heritage to celebrate, or even mention, one's Native American roots. Now, though, that is no longer the case. William Loren Katz's landmark book, The Black Indians, provides vital information long missing from the pages of American history... There [...]
I am neither American nor Jamaican, and yet I am both American and Jamaican. I am a “Jamerican.” I was born in America, but my parents are Jamaican. Up until the late 1960s there were few people from the English-speaking Caribbean living in New York. The only time I heard a Caribbean accent [...]
Contrary to popular belief, African Americans are by no means a homogeneous population. They are composed of a variety, of now overlapping, but originally much more distinct, ethnic strands. In coastal South Carolina, there are the Gullah people, and in coastal Georgia the Geechies. (The two terms are often used interchangeably.) The Gullah are [...]
During the Cold War, the struggle between the US and Russia after WW II, the two superpowers showered money and attention on Africa as they competed for the allegiance of its many newly independent nations. Now Russia is a shadow of what it once was, but China has emerged as a superpower with great [...]