General History

Algiers is the second-oldest neighborhood in the city of New Orleans and stretches 12 miles from Riverview to the Cut Off. A rural area, in comparison to the inner city of New Orleans, Algiers's land was cleared by African slaves, and plantation homes...

A modern Cinderella must defend her fairy-tale marriage in a scandal that rocked jazz-age America. When Alice Jones, a former domestic, married Leonard Rhinelander in 1924, she became the first black woman to be listed in the Social Register as a member...

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

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...

In 1992 Smithsonian anthropologist Michael Atwood Mason traveled to Cuba for initiation as a priest into the Santería religion. Since then he has created an active oricha "house" and has initiated five others as priests. He is a rare combination: a...

First published in 1962, Lincoln and the Negro was the first book to examine in detail how Lincoln faced the problem of the status of black people in American democracy, and it remains unsurpassed. Starting with Lincoln's childhood attitudes, Benjamin...

The year 1964 produced a watershed in American race relations. In one of the civil rights movement's most dramatic initiatives, thousands of Northern white college students were recruited to come south that summer in an effort to "break" Mississippi and...

Life on the Back Side of the Sport of Kings is the third of three intriguing books written by James Wright that probe into the heart of America's apartheid consciousness. It is about broken promises and old cliques America has made and still purports to...

Starting in pre-Islamic Arabia and deepest Africa, following the lives, adventures and writings of three Muslim slaves through antebellum America and the world of trans-Atlantic slavery, Liberty's Jihad takes us on a fascinating journey spanning...

Starting in pre-Islamic Arabia and deepest Africa, following the lives, adventures and writings of three Muslim slaves through antebellum America and the world of trans-Atlantic slavery, Liberty's Jihad takes us on a fascinating journey spanning...

This book covers the British involvement in Libya from 1692 until the 21st century.Free Libya! was the chant heard throughout Libya during the Arab Spring revolution that ended with the death of Colonel Gadaffi in October 2011. The story is about British...

Amid the spiritual and intellectual turmoil of seventeenth-century England, the Quakers emerged and grew into a distinct and enduring religious movement. This book offers a fresh and striking insight into early Quaker history through a study of their...