African American Studies

MMXX: The Black Artivism Capsule is a curated collection of art made by Black creatives worldwide during the 2020 pandemic. In the midst of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, John Lewis, Chadwick Boseman, and Kobe and Gigi Bryant, we also had to...

Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat: guys shopping for barbecue grills, doing that special walk men do when in the presence of lumber; superefficient soccer Ubermoms who chair school auctions, organize PTAs, and weigh less than their kids;...

An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors "[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy...

In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain's Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged...

An Imperfect God is a major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slaveryWhen George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves...

A narrative-driven exploration of policing and the punishment of disadvantage in Chicago, and a new vision for repairing urban neighborhoods For people of color who live in segregated urban neighborhoods, surviving crime and violence is a generational...

The story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets More than a hundred years ago, French troops fired the first tear gas grenades at the German enemy. Designed to force people out from cover, tear gas causes tearing and gagging,...

The narrative spell cast over politics and societyPolitics is no longer the art of the possible, but of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way that it is perceived. In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at...

Mapping the class divisions that run throughout Europe Over the last ten years - especially with the 'no' votes in the French and Dutch referendums in 2010, and the victory for Brexit in 2016 - the issue of Europe has been placed at the centre of major...

A distinguished anthropologist tells his life story as a wistful novelist would, watching himself as if he were someone elseThis memoir recaptures meaningful moments from the author's life: as his childhood on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, his...

Queen of Bebop brilliantly chronicles the life of jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of the most influential and innovative musicians of the twentieth century and a pioneer of women's and civil rightsSarah Vaughan, a pivotal figure in the formation of bebop,...

In 2005, Uzodinma Iweala stunned readers and critics alike with Beasts of No Nation, his debut novel about child soldiers in West Africa. Now his return to his native continent has produced Our Kind of People, a nonfiction account of the AIDS crisis that...

In the early morning hours of December 8, 1969, three hundred officers of the newly created elite paramilitary tactical unit known as SWAT initiated a violent battle with a handful of Los Angeles-based members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense...

Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, thirty-one-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail--and the time that...

Winner of the 2017 American Book Award Flores Forbes, a former leader in the Black Panther Party, has been free from prison for twenty-five years. Unfortunately that makes him part of a group of black men without constituency who are all but invisible...