General History

An illustrated highlight reel of more than 100 women in rap who have helped shape the genre and eschewed gender norms in the process The Motherlode highlights more than 100 women who have shaped the power, scope, and reach of rap music, including...

The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation's racial regime. In a masterpiece of...

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only...

Black women physicians' stories have gone untold for far too long, leaving gaping holes in American medical history, in women's history, and in black history. It's time to set the record straight   No real account of black women physicians in the...

The familiar story of civil rights goes something like this: Once, the American legal system was dominated by racist officials who shut Black people out and refused to recognize their basic human dignity. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers...

Drawn from his New York Times bestseller A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn's The Other Civil War offers the historian and activist's view of the social and civil background of the American Civil War--a view that is rarely provided in...

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality--and revealing new possibilities...

Explore Captivating Stories and Facts about African American History!The history of African Americans is a long and tragic chronicle of events. The people who dared to stand up and speak out against the systemic cruelty and oppression were often brutally...

In "South Side Girls" Marcia Chatelain recasts Chicago's Great Migration through the lens of black girls. Focusing on the years between 1910 and 1940, when Chicago's black population quintupled, Chatelain describes how Chicago's black social scientists,...

Mary McLeod Bethune was often called the "First Lady of Negro America," but she made significant contributions to the political climate of Florida as well. From the founding of the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in 1904, B

"Freedom Summer" presents finely rendered portraits of the courageous black citizens--and Northern volunteers--who refused to be intimidated in their struggle for justice, and the white Mississippians who would kill to protect a dying way of life.A...

"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...

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America's legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed...

Legal legend Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer once stated that there were "only two people in the world who really understood the Constitution" and its impact on American lives. One was Hugo Black, deceased Supreme Court justice. The other was William Benson...

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - A "vivid and frank" (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community's ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic   "A...