New Children’s Book Reveals the Black History of the UK

If you’re British then chances are growing up, you had or at least your library had a book about Stonehenge and inside there would have been depictions of people dragging and raising the stones that make up this prehistoric monument. I’d harbour a guess that in that those depictions showed the people as light skinned, the colour we think of when we think of Northern Europeans, but now a new book is set to shatter all our misconceptions, teaching today’s children history, and pre-history as it really was.

Science knows that early Britons would have been dark skinned, in fact at a stage in pre-history, everyone was dark skinned, and this new children’s book sets the record straight. Brilliant Black British History was published on 31st August by Bloomsbury and is promoted by The Book Trust.

The book takes readers through an overview of the presence of black people in Britain, and explains how Britain was a black country more than 7,000 years before white people appeared, and during that time Stonehenge, Britain’s most famous monument was built.

The book also explains that make Roman legionary’s would have been black, and follows the timeline through the Middle Ages, when Britain was a hodgepodge of people, and shades, with a population made up of Celts, Romans, Britons, Anglo-Savons, Vikings, Africans and Normans

The blurb calls it an ‘eye opening history of Britain’ that focuses on ‘a part of our past that has mostly been left out of history books’ and adds that the first Britons were black, and that many Roman soldiers who invaded and ruled Britain were black too.

Brilliant Black British History is available now, and is likely to create a small change in the narrative, and misconceptions many of us were raised with.