Cultural Literature

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip,...

In Colored Boy, Olin Gaines Jr. spares no details in describing the harsh realities of life for Black Americans after the era of slavery. Centered in his home in Hartford, Connecticut, the book highlights the simple pleasures of life in the projects as...

Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love - Anti-Black Racism in the Charitable Sector is a collection of stories documenting racism and survival by 15 accomplished Black fundraisers working in charities across North America. With searing and intimate...

In Collapse of the African American Family, Anthropologist Gregory Days presents a twenty-first century wake-up call to his fellow African Americans and America as a nation. Days shares his observations as a Black man who spent years working as a...

Few figures in the past quarter-century have played a more significant role in American foreign policy than Colin Powell. He wielded power at the highest levels of the most important foreign policy bureaucracies: the Pentagon, the White House, the joint...

Being the child of a global superstar is never easy. Being the daughter of the Godfather of Soul--that's a category unto itself. Like every little girl, Yamma Brown wanted her father's attention, but fame, drugs, jail, and the complicated women in James...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down...

Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules--based largely on an individual's ability...

A conversation with filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, exploring how his work with montage can be understood to articulate contemporaneity in sensuous ways. Taking the form of a conversation with filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, this book sets out to...

Climbing Jacob's Ladder traces the history of the black family from its roots in Africa, through slavery, Reconstruction, the Depression, and the civil rights movement, to the present, arguing that black families cannot be measured against white norms...

Featuring over 200 striking photographs from the 1920s through 1980, Black America: Cleveland, Ohio celebrates the rich history of this great city's African-American community. Its neighborhoods, churches, civil, religious, business and cultural leaders,...

Clementine Hunter (1887--1988) painted every day from the 1930s until several days before her death at age 101. As a cook and domestic servant at Louisiana's Melrose Plantation, she painted on hundreds of objects available around her -- glass snuff...