Cultural Literature

Blues singer Bessie Smith was a good-hearted, brawling alcoholic whose musical influence can still be heard today. The eclectic world she inhabited during the Harlem Renaissance was fascinating and strangely modern in its acceptance of racial mixing and...

The future of the United States rests in many ways on how the ongoing challenge of racial injustice in the country is addressed. Yet, humanists remain divided over what if any agenda should guide humanist thought and action toward questions of race. In...

Whatever your sentiments towards or knowledge of coffee, the stories coffee has to tell are surprising, intriguing, and always human. Part travelogue meets anthropological field notes, part industry review meets food sourcing exposé, When Coffee Speaks...

Reduce, reuse, and recycle is not a new concept. Many Black Americans have been doing this out of necessity for years. In addition to learning how to use limited resources creatively and imaginatively, Blacks learned to survive on simplicity--a lesson in...

“History at its best--clear, intelligent, moving. Paula Giddings has written a book as priceless as its subject”--Toni Morrison Acclaimed by writers Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter is not only an eloquent...

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the...

This is one man's coming to terms with all the negative decisions he's made throughout his life, as well as the influence his culture has had on these decisions in his life. He attempts to dissect and analyze some of the prevalent and erroneous mindsets...

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN BLACK MEN AND WOMEN IN AMERICA ARE IN CRISIS. IT'S TIME TO FIGURE OUT WHAT'S GONE WRONG AND START THE HEALING PROCESS. The current divorce rates for black couples has quadrupled since 1960 and is now double that of the general...

When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the world lost one of the greatest moral authorities of the twentieth century. We would all benefit from hearing Martin's voice, if only he were alive today. . . .If anyone would...

For nearly a century, blacks and Jews were allies in the struggle for civil rights and equality in America. Sometimes risking their lives, they waged battle in the courts, at lunch counters, and in the academy, advancing the cause of all minorities...

In 2004, Laurie Levinger left her home in Vermont for Guatemala, where she planned to teach English to Maya university students. But on the first day of class, Levinger became the student instead of the teacher when a young man named Fernando introduced...

In Battle Cry Of Freedom, James M. McPherson presented a fascinating, concise general history of the defining American conflict. With What They Fought For, he focuses his considerable talents on what motivated the individual soldier to fight. In an...