Cultural Literature

Chasing the Blues explores the roots of the blues---the music birthed in the Mississippi Delta by African Americans who fashioned a new form of musical expression grounded in their shared experience of brutal oppression. They used the power of music to...

In this revelatory and moving memoir, a former NASA astronaut and NFL wide receiver shares his personal journey from the gridiron to the stars, examining the intersecting roles of community, perseverance and grace that align to create the opportunities...

"A compelling and important history that this nation desperately needs to hear." -Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field...

This inspiring memoir of one woman's experience in the field is an exotic adventure story, a surprise journey of self-discovery, and a deeply personal appreciation of a place that's unlike any other. At age twenty-five, graduate student Keriann McGoogan...

Always elusive, constantly moving, incessantly changing, John Coltrane stood astride the jazz world of the late '50s and '60s. He was a giant of the saxophone and a major composer. His music influenced both rock stars and classical musicians. There was a...

Winner of the 2021 Hayek Book Prize A leading conservative intellectual defends charter schools against the teachers' unions, politicians, and liberal educators who threaten to dismantle their success. The black-white educational achievement gap -- so...

For many, the story of jazz guitar begins with Charlie Christian. In 1939, at 23 years old, Charlie joined the Bennie Goodman Sextet, already one of the most famous jazz bands in the world. Over the next two years of his all-too-brief life Charlie...

June 1910, Charleston, South Carolina. A Jewish merchant, Max Lubelsky, lay murdered in his clothing store on Upper King Street. The black man eventually convicted of the crime was arrested several weeks later as an angry mob called for his lynching...

For 140 years, Charleston s Avery Research Center has been a hub of African American education and study in the South Carolina Lowcountry. No other institution compares to Avery s scope and impact on the black community in Charleston, and Avery s...

Saxophonist and composer Charles Lloyd has been a strong and important voice in the jazz world since the late 1950s. This freewheeling, fascinating unauthorized biographybased on twenty years' worth of interviews covers the extreme ups and downs of an...

A New Yorker writer's intimate, revealing account of Tupac Shakur's life and legacy, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. In the summer of 2020, Tupac Shakur's single "Changes" became an anthem for the...

A New Yorker writer's intimate, revealing account of Tupac Shakur's life and legacy, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death.In the summer of 2020, Tupac Shakur's single "Changes" became an anthem for the...