Covering the period from the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act to the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey in 1925, Moses examines the tradition of black nationalism in the literature, as well as the intellectual and institutional history, of black Americans. He explores the burst of literary output, resulting from the initial development of black nationalism, that continued to the end of the nineteenth century. He also examines the powerful revitalization of this tradition that occurred with the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Pan-Africanism of W.E.B. Du Bois and describes the trends that led to the decline of classical black nationalism at the time of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro Movement."