The leading American Historical Review published a special issue in which it published five large articles under the general title "African History Today "(1983, N 4). Such attention to the past of a distant continent is not accidental. It is primarily caused by general reasons - the growing role of African countries in the modern world, progressive socio - economic, political and cultural changes taking place in them. The interest of US bourgeois science in the past and present of African peoples is, of course, far from disinterested. Scientific expansion and the export of bourgeois ideology and methodology remain one of the main directions of US foreign policy towards developing countries in Africa. This is evidenced, for example, by the report to the US Congress on the 1981 trip of the scientific adviser to the American president to Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Zimbabwe .1 Calls for further intensification of ideological penetration in Africa are constantly heard from the pages of influential organs of the bourgeois press .2Among other reasons for the development of American African studies, we can mention the increased interest of a significant part of the Black population of the United States in their distant past and their ancestral homeland-Africa. Finally, there is another private reason why the journal of the American Historical Association devoted an entire issue to African topics for the first time in many years of its existence: in 1983, the association's president was a prominent African scholar, F. B. Smith. Kartinov, Professor of the University named after him. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Reading the articles in this issue of the journal provides an opportunity to get acquainted with trends in modern African studies in the United States, to get an idea of the main directions, topics, source base of research and methodological searches of African historians. Both the journal's articles and the article-by-article bibliography indicate an increase in pub ... Read more