General African American Studies

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR AND PASTE MAGAZINE An intimate account of life in a West African fishing village, tugged by currents ancient and modern, and dependent on an ocean that is being radically transformed. The sea...

Es'kia Mphahlele's seminal memoir of life in apartheid South Africa--available for the first time in Penguin Classics Nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1969, Es'kia Mphahlele is considered the Dean of African Letters and the father of black South African...

In the late nineteenth century, Charles Booth's landmark social and economic survey found that 35 percent of Londoners were living in abject poverty. Booth's team of social investigators interviewed Londoners from all walks of life, recording their...

"One of our true superstars of nonfiction" (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche. We live in a culture that prizes memory--how much we...

What happens to a little girl who grows up without a father? Can she ever feel truly loved and fully alive? Does she ever heal--or is she doomed to live a wounded, fragmented life and to pass her wounds down to her own children? Fatherlessness afflicts...

- Revised and expanded with recently uncovered information - Detailed maps of escape routes and networks - Eyewitness accounts of fugitives Organized in antebellum America to help slaves escape to freedom, the Underground Railroad was cloaked in secrecy...

What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? The Suspect draws on the author's lived experiences of being suspected of terrorism to take the reader on a journey through British...

How community-centered, peer-to-peer, youth knowledge exchanges are evolving into a strong economic and political foundation on which to build radical public education. Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic and...

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost...

With hate crimes on the rise and social movements like Black Lives Matter bringing increased attention to the issue of police brutality, the American public continues to be divided by issues of race. How do adolescents and young adults form friendships...

Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don't even notice it - in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable,...

The dark heart of race science... and why it's nonsense. Racial differences are rooted in biological reality, right? That's certainly what a small group of anthropologists, psychologists and pundits would have you believe. Portraying themselves as brave...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how...

A powerful argument for adopting a model of restorative justice as part of the Innocence Movement--so exonerees, crime victims, and their communities can come together to heal In Rectify, a former Innocence Project director and journalist Lara Bazelon...

Together these two essays mark the philosophic cornerstone of democratic morality and represent a thought-provoking search for the true balance between the rights of the individual and the power of the state. Thoroughly schooled in the principles of the...

A powerful challenge to the way we understand the politics of race and the history of anti-racist struggleWhether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history's most contentious debates...