Things Remembered: An Album of African Americans in Tampa.

Tampa, Florida: University of Tampa Press, 1997. Quarto, blue cloth (hardcover), gilt lettering, 216 pp. Very Good in a Very Good dust jacket with sunned spine. From dust jacket: Florida history has been enriched from the beginning by its African American residents, but much too little has been known of their lives and their many achievements. Beginning with her own memories and the recollections of her family and friends in Tampa, Rowena Ferrell Brady has produced a unique document of photographic history which reveals a provocative and virtually unknown history of the area. The great Victorian essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle wrote that “the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.” Things Remembered, with its splendid mix of text and photographs, makes poetry of history in presenting fascinating insights into African American life. As we look at the intelligence, strength, love, joy, and pride reflected in the faces on these pages, we cannot help but reach a truer understanding of our past. You will find profound and provocative statements about truth and values on nearly every page of this book, and you are bound to leave your reading of it truly enriched. Nearly 300 years ago the French writer Bernard de Fontenelle observed, “Truth enters the mind so easily that when we hear it for the first time it seems as if we were simply recalling it to memory.” Rowena Ferrell Brady’s Things Remembered will awake these truths within us all.