History

Tupac: The Modern-Day Messiah is a courageous attempt to connect the late Tupac Shakur's intricate lyricism and profound interviews into a variety of societal flaws including, but not up to, racial oppression, police brutality, and economic inequality...

From the author of What This Cruel War Was Over, a vivid portrait of the Union army's escaped-slave refugee camps and how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States. Chandra Manning casts in a wholly original light what...

Most histories of Reconstruction deal primarily with political issues and the larger conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, notherners and southerners. The Trouble They Seen departs from this approach to examine in their own words the lives of...

"The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America. . . . Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy." --The Washington Post "The most...

A milestone in the study of culture from the father of structural anthropologyThis watershed work records Claude Lévi-Strauss's search for a human society reduced to its most basic expression. From the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of...

Transformed tells how civic leaders in Pittsburgh--once the world's steel capital--brought new uses to five derelict industrial brownfield sites. Polluted and largely abandoned Herr's Island became Washington's Landing, with upscale housing, a marina,...

Martin Luther King, Jr once said, 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character'. This is one of the aspirations many had when...

Tranquility Grove: The Great Abolitionist Picnic of 1844 tells the story of an important event that took place in Hingham, Massachusetts. Attended by as many as 10,000 people, the largest abolitionist picnic in history marked the tenth anniversary of the...

On October 8, 1930, Charles "Cap" Sauers, general superintendent of the Cook County Forest Preserve District, wrote a letter to Alfred M. Bailey, director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, about an idea he had. He proposed developing several nature...

DE-MISEDUCATION is the culmination of eight years of research that sought to focus on objectivity while balancing breath and conciseness. Its focus is on black America as a people and as a part of greater America. It begins with the Black Golden Age...

In 1859, at age fourteen, Florence Szász stood before a room full of men and waited to be auctioned to the highest bidder. But slavery and submission were not to be her destiny: Sam Baker, a wealthy English gentleman and eminent adventurer, was moved by...

This powerful and widely acclaimed autobiography of Sindiwe Magona's early years in South Africa, announced the arrival of a major new black writer. Here she gives an account of her eventful first 23 years and tells a candid, unself-pitying story of...

Taking its title from the moving lyrics of the official song of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Lift Every Voice and Sing, Till Victory Is Won chronicles significant moments in African-American history through more than...

A secular regime is toppled by Western intervention, but an Islamic backlash turns the liberators into occupiers. Caught between interventionists at home and fundamentalists abroad, a prime minister flounders as his ministers betray him, alliances fall...

The case of James Somerset, an escaped slave, in June of 1772 in London's Westminster Hall was a decisive turning point in human history. Steven Wise has uncovered fascinating new revelations in this case, which statesmen of the time threatened would...

In this original and illuminating book, Denise A. Spellberg reveals a little-known but crucial dimension of the story of American religious freedom--a drama in which Islam played a surprising role. In 1765, eleven years before composing the Declaration...