African Americans are a people who care deeply about history. And yet, we are a people who know so little about our history. Three centuries of American chattel slavery did much to uproot generations of American-born Africans from specific African linguistic, cultural, religious and historical soil. The result, as Deborah Dickerson observes in her irenic and insightful book The End of Blackness, is that African-Americans are at once a history-conscious people and “a people with no return address.”