Cultural Literature

An honor killing is the cold-blooded murder of girls and women simply because they are female. Being born female in a shame-and-honor culture is, potentially, a capital crime; every girl has to keep proving that she is not dishonoring her family; even...

World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason "Timbuktu" Diakité's vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family's history--from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up...

In this inspiring and provocative memoir about a young black man, Caylin Moore tells the against-all-odds story of his rise from racial injustice and cruel poverty in gang-ridden Los Angeles to academic success at the University of Oxford, with hope as...

Steele has given eloquent voice to painful truths that are almost always left unspoken in the nation's circumscribed public discourse on race. --New York TimesFrom the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character and White Guilt...

"Here is a life story so unbelievable, it could only be true." --Sandra Cisneros, bestselling author of The House on Mango Street From bestselling author of the remarkable memoir The Distance Between Us comes an inspiring account of one woman's quest to...

Thurgood Marshall's extraordinary contribution to civil rights and overcoming racism is more topical than ever, as the national debate on race and the overturning of affirmative action policies make headlines nationwide. Howard Ball, author of eighteen...

"Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature." --The Wall Street Journal "If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting...

The Black man from birth until death has been saddled with systemic racism, discrimination, and police violence. These immoral acts are parallel to the genocide of the American Indians, the indigenous people of this land, or the deliberate and systematic...

An innocent online DNA test releases fifty years of hidden and long-buried secrets. Her husband takes an online DNA test to help in building his family tree and research his ancestry. His wife is somewhat amused by it and doesn't have much interest in it...

An innocent online DNA test releases fifty years of hidden and long-buried secrets. Her husband takes an online DNA test to help in building his family tree and research his ancestry. His wife is somewhat amused by it and doesn't have much interest in it...

A Daughter of the Samurai offers an elegant account of a world that had all but vanished by the time Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto put pen to paper. In her beguiling memoir Sugimoto chronicles her childhood in the frozen Nagaoka region of Japan, where she grows...

Courage to Love in the Shadow of HateA Darker Shade of Pale tells of Beryl Crosher-Segers' family and community life in apartheid-era South Africa. With a piercing narrative, she details the injustices, humiliation and challenges she faced under the...

Roger L. Green was born in Nebraska-the third of four children in his family. The Green family moved to Africa in 1950, staying for 10 years. After returning to the U.S. from Africa, Roger graduated from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and went into...

One of the surest ways to connect with the past is to sample what was on its plate. That's the goal with this gustatory journey through Alabama history. Sweetmeats with the governor's lonely, oft-depressed wife in 1832 Greensboro. Shrimp and crabmeat...

Missouri's history is best told through food, from its Native American and later French colonial roots to the country's first viticultural area. Learn about the state's vibrant barbecue culture, which stems from African American cooks, including Henry...

Pull up a chair to the kitchen table and enjoy a delicious adventure through Bluegrass food history. Kentucky's cuisine can be traced back to Cherokee, Irish, Scottish, English and German roots, among others. A typical Kentucky meal might have the standar