Glazer, Nathan. "Out of Africa." Review of Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge by Jerry Gershenhorn, The New Republic, February 14, 2005.

Excerpt: Melville J. Herskovits is best known today for his book The Myth of the Negro Past, which appeared in 1941, and argued that one could find among American Negroes “survivals” or “retentions” of their original African background. It was generally assumed at the time that all African cultural characteristics had been burned away by the fire of slavery. And so Herskovits’s thesis was controversial then, and it is controversial today, despite Jerry Gershenhorn’s effort to assimilate it to more recent notions such as the “black power” of the 1960s and the “multiculturalism” of the 1990s. But Herskovits was certainly a major figure in his time, involved in significant controversies over the nature of American black identity in the prewar years and writing voluminously on Dahomey (now Benin) and various groups of diaspora blacks in the New World.

Online:
The New Republic