Cultural Literature

Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal," created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the...

From a New York Times bestselling author, the definitive history of the Kerner Commission, whose report on urban unrest reshaped American debates about race and inequality In Separate and Unequal, New York Times bestselling historian Steven M. Gillon...

The creator of the internationally popular, multiple award-winning blog MsAfropolitan applies an Africa-centered feminist sensibility to issues of racism and sexism, challenging our illusions about oppression and liberation and daring women to embrace...

Enjoy a taste of Florida's history with this collection of hearty recipes inspired by Semi¬nole cooking. Each dish evokes a time now past, when foods like venison, coontie, pumpkin, heart of palm, and guava were important parts of delicious feasts across...

"Its members consisted of some of the finest guerrilla-fighting men in the western world, unconventional in many ways, disregardful of parade-ground discipline, unorthodox in their dress, yet a force so tightly knit in the face of danger that those who...

We are living in an age of heightened individualism. Success is a personal responsibility. Our culture tells us that to succeed is to be slim, rich, happy, extroverted, popular--flawless. We have become self-obsessed. And our expectation of perfection...

We live in the age of the individual. Every day, we're bombarded with depictions of the beautiful, successful, slim, socially conscious, and extroverted individual that our culture has decided is the perfect self, and we berate ourselves when we don't...

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton...

Forceful and detailed account of the struggle for "freedom" after the American Civil War How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger's radical new...

A riveting, revealing portrait of tennis champion and global icon Serena Williams that combines biography, cultural criticism, and sports writing to offer "a deep, satisfying meditation" (The New York Times) on the most consequential athlete of her time...

In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where color doesn't matter--where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with...