Liberia Reading List

In my ongoing research and creative work reflecting on Liberia, I have found these resources to offer nuanced and generative critical perspectives -


HISTORICAL

C. Patrick Burrowes - Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea: A History of the Liberian People Before 1800 (Know Your Self Press, 2016)

Gregg Mitman - Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (The New Press, 2021)

Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman - Jellemoh: A Story of the Life and Times of Victoria Elizabeth Jellemoh Grimes, A Liberian Wife & Mother (New World African Press, 2005)

Marie Tyler-McGraw - An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014)


HISTORICAL FICTION

Wayétu Moore - She Would Be King (Graywolf Press, 2019)

Vamba Sherif - Land of My Fathers (HopeRoad, 2017)


MEMOIR

Wayétu Moore - The Dragons, the Giant, the Women (Graywolf Press, 2020)


ARTICLES

Brooks Marmon - Liberia’s Pan-Africanism: a reappraisal and interview with D. Elwood Dunn, Review of African Political Economy (2022)

Tamba E. M’bayo - W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan-Africanism in Liberia, 1919–1924, The Historian, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 19-44 (Spring 2004)


WEBSITES

A Liberian Journey: History, Memory, and the Making of a Nation (Center for National Documents and Records Agency in Liberia, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Indiana University Liberian Collections, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Liberia: Abbreviated Historical Timeline, Public Broadcasting Service (2002)