General History

With Freedom's Lawmakers, Eric Foner has assembled the first comprehensive directory of the over 1,500 African Americans who held political office in the South during the Reconstruction era. He has compiled an impressive amount of information about the...

First published in 1963, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called "Negro problem." As remarkable for its masterful prose as for its frank and personal account of the black experience in the United States, it is...

A beautiful commemorative edition of Dr. Martin Luther King's last speech ""I've Been to the Mountaintop,"" part of Dr. King's archives published exclusively by HarperCollins.On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the pulpit of Mason...

An inside look at the music born, bred, and perfected in Chicago.Chicago house music originated in the city's Black, gay underground in the late seventies and became one of the most popular musical genres in the world by the end of the century. In...

"The Barn is the most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read...Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than...

An unflinching look at a shocking racial tragedy that divides a Southern city--comparable to the recent events in Charlottesville--and the activists who, in their tireless fight for justice, refuse to give up on America's promised ideals, and pursue...

A cinematic memoir of justice and redemption that traces one man's tumultuous life from gang member to Black liberation leader to political prisoner. Russell Shoatz was a gang member in inner Philadelphia starting at age 11. But at 23, after hearing...

For decades, Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry: from Medgar Evers in Turn Me Loose, winner of the NAACP Award; to York, the enslaved explorer who joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, in...

Originally published in 1916, this innovative peanut recipe book by prominent Black scientist George Washington Carver is just as delicious today. How many ways can you possibly prepare the peanut? At least 105, according to George Washington Carver. In...

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation's third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of...

"This book is a masterpiece. It captures the essence of the Tuskegee Airmen's experience from the perspective of one who lived it. The action sequences make me feel I'm back in the cockpit of my P-51C 'Kitten'! If you want to know what it was like...

"A timely, detailed, and inspiring book that helps maintain the intellectual legacy of Shirley Chisholm. The book reveals new dimensions of the congresswoman's politics, activism, and spirit."--Regina King, Academy Award-winning actor and star of Shirley...

A vital narrative history of 1970s pro basketball, and the Black players who shaped the NBA Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent...

The provocative debate about Malcolm X's legacy that emerged after the publication of Manning Marable's 2011 biography raised critical questions about the revolutionary Black Nationalist's importance to American and world affairs: What was Malcolm's...

Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago's South Side...

Inspiring stories of those who risked their lives so others would be free. In Defiance is a corrective. American history has historically suffered from the systematic effort of many in power to suppress the stories of those whose lives serve as models...