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A critical reappraisal of Vincent Harding's transformative work as a preeminent historian of the African American freedom struggle is long overdue. Examining Harding's major works – There Is A River (1981), Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (1996), and Hope and History (1990) – this paper focuses on Harding's revisionist approach to US religious history by addressing three historiographical elements: radical reinterpretation of historical narrative from the perspective of the oppressed; the uses and abuses of biography in the historical representations of Dr. King in popular culture and collective memory; and articulation of a philosophy of history rooted in a theology of hope and human flourishing. This paper illustrates how Harding's writings advance a liberating vision for history as both a discipline and discursive realm in service to social justice and human dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs a comparative and interdisciplinary approach that brings together Holocaust studies and Black Church studies in order tomakes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global era. This work is achieved by engaging in an examination regarding the reflections of African Americans in the face of Nazi atrocities towards the Jews. Through their confrontation of Nazism and the Holocaust, African American religio-cultural interpretations of the events surrounding the Shoah enabled the articulation of parallel histories of victimization and liberation associated with the White supremacist terror in the American South. This liberationist work was undertaken even as the Nazis' systematic persecution and murder of millions of people was being construed as 'unique' among historic genocides and other human-perpetrated horrors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]