Cultural Literature

A riveting cautionary tale about the ecstasy and dangers of loving Marvin Gaye, a performer passionately pursued by all--and a searing memoir of drugs, sex, and old school R&B from the wife of legendary soul icon Marvin Gaye.After her seventeenth...

The daughter of a prominent Black businessman, Dolores Mae Duncan grew up in New York City during the exhilarating 1930s. A unique and progressive education at the famed Little Red School House in Greenwich Village helped Dolores prepare for a life she...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - United States Senator Cory Booker makes the case that the virtues of empathy, responsibility, and action must guide our nation toward a brighter future. Raised in northern New Jersey, Cory Booker went to Stanford University...

Nearly a century's worth of Scurlock photographs combine to form a searing portrait of black Washington in all its guises--its challenges and its victories, its dignity and its determination. Beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into...

The most comprehensive and up-to-date monograph available on the work of the celebrated artist, a trailblazer who continues to influence and inspireLorna Simpson is a multimedia artist known for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. In 1993...

Winner of the Southern Anthropological Society's prestigious James Mooney Award, Uncommon Ground takes a unique archaeological approach to examining early African American life. Ferguson shows how black pioneers worked within the bars of bondage to shape...

A book all Americans should read, Slave Nation reveals the key role racism played in the American Revolutionary War, so we can see our past more clearly and build a better future.In 1772, the High Court in London freed a slave from Virginia named...

A thrilling new route to a better societyA toxic ideology of extreme competition and individualism has come to dominate our world. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that...

For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness...

Two African American men from poor, rural Mississippi wrongfully convicted for crimes they didn't commit. Lost years of their lives spent in jail and finally released a decade a half later thanks to the Innocence Project and DNA testing. This is their...

A clear-eyed and compassionate memoir of the Appalachian experience by a woman who embraced its astonishing beauty, narrowly escaped its violence, and struggles to call it home.Bobi Conn was raised in a remote Kentucky holler in 1980s Appalachia. She...

"Revelatory . . . one of the most briskly revealing pieces of jazz biography that I've read." --Richard Brody, The New Yorker When Billie Holiday first stepped into a recording studio in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the...