Cultural Literature

In a memoir both personal and public, Ken Reiman, a diplomat with dual nationality, tells the story of his heritage from a Japanese mother and American father, and his lifelong desire to serve the United States as a member of the U.S. Foreign Service in...

Love after Babel is a brilliant new poetry collection by Dalit poet Chandramohan S, a highly charged political treatise. Chandramohan's position as a Dalit writer illuminates his treatment of caste-based oppression, while also creating a sense of radical...

As trumpet player and singer, Louis Armstrong is the single most important figure in jazz history, and one of the most influential musicians--in any category--in this century. He was also, as this book relates, a wonderful character: actor, clown,...

Though you may not know the man, you probably know his music. Arkansas-born Louis Jordan's songs like Baby, It's Cold Outside," "Caldonia" and "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" can still be heard today, decades since Jordan ruled the charts. In his five

Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz and one of this century's towering cultural figures, yet the full story of his extravagant life has never been told. Born in 1901 to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a slave, he came of age among the...

In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was a place of colliding identities and histories, and Louis Armstrong was a gifted young man of psychological nimbleness. A dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up under low expectations, Jim Crow...

An important and timely anthology of black British writing, edited and curated by the authors of the highly acclaimed, ground-breaking Slay In Your Lane. Slay in Your Lane Presents: Loud Black Girls features essays from the diverse voices of twenty...

Lost or forgotten were the walls that now proudly carry the messages of calligraffiti artist eL Seed. "Lost Walls", his first book, beautifully and poetically documents these walls, handpicked during his road trip around Tunisia. "Lost Walls" is a...

From Justice Department officials seizing people's homes based on mere rumors to the IRS and its master plan to prohibit the nation's self-employed from working for themselves to the perpetrators of the Waco siege, government officials are tearing the...

People of African descent were some of Galveston's earliest residents, and although they came to the island enslaved, they retained mastery of their culinary traditions. As Galveston's port prospered and became the Wall Street of the South, better job...

Buxton, Iowa, was an unincorporated coal mining town, established by Consolidation Coal Company in 1900. At a time when Jim Crow laws and segregation kept blacks and whites separated throughout the nation, Buxton was integrated. African American and...

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic...