Cultural Literature

We are living in an age of heightened individualism. Success is a personal responsibility. Our culture tells us that to succeed is to be slim, rich, happy, extroverted, popular--flawless. We have become self-obsessed. And our expectation of perfection...

We live in the age of the individual. Every day, we're bombarded with depictions of the beautiful, successful, slim, socially conscious, and extroverted individual that our culture has decided is the perfect self, and we berate ourselves when we don't...

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton...

Now a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, Self Made (formerly titled On Her Own Ground) is the first full-scale biography of "one of the great success stories of American history" (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker--the legendary African...

Forceful and detailed account of the struggle for "freedom" after the American Civil War How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger's radical new...

A riveting, revealing portrait of tennis champion and global icon Serena Williams that combines biography, cultural criticism, and sports writing to offer "a deep, satisfying meditation" (The New York Times) on the most consequential athlete of her time...

In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where color doesn't matter--where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with...

Opal Singleton is President and CEO of Million Kids and Training and Outreach Coordinator for Riverside County Anti Human Trafficking Task Force. Opal trains thousands of government agencies, school administrators, corporations, civic groups and faith...

This book offers key concepts and practical guidance about the planner's role in countering terrorist risk. Public safety and security has always been a fundamental premise of successful public spaces and a material consideration in planning processes,...

Driven by the love for storytelling, this autobiography was written in the form of short stories (based on true events). Each short story creatively and collectively describes the top ten most valuable life lessons or secrets that Tarick learned while...

Secret societies have operated in Detroit for most of the city's history. Many started for fun and companionship. Others had more serious ends in mind. The African American Mysteries: The Order of the Men of Oppression helped enslaved people escape the...

Secret societies have operated in Detroit for most of the city's history. Many started for fun and companionship. Others had more serious ends in mind. The African American Mysteries: The Order of the Men of Oppression helped enslaved people escape the...

Often a forgotten or glossed-over part of our history as Americans, the Buffalo Soldiers were a unique fighting force in the nineteenth century. Made up of new recruits and black Civil War veterans who found it difficult to fit into the U.S. Army during...

The public and the media are fascinated by U.S. government secrets, real and imagined, yet very few people know how the process of obtaining formerly secret documents works. Secrecy Wars is a look inside the American secrecy system as it is accessed...