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and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family,
1846-1926 by Adele Logan Alexander is a monumental history that
traces the rise of an African-American family (the author's own)
from poverty to the middle class, exploding the stereotypes that
have shaped and distorted our thinking about African Americans,
both as slaves and in freedom.  The result of exhaustive
research in academic archives and family papers, this remarkable
account follows three generations of the Bond family from
Victorian England to antebellum Virginia, from suburban Boston
to the Jim Crow South, from black college campuses to Harvard,
from naval skirmishes during the Civil War to the battlefields
of Argonne. We see how, over the course of eighty crucial years
in American history the Bond family both unwittingly and
willfully interacted with the major political, technological,
and cultural issues of their time, and how notions of race,
class, and gender both limited and