General History

The Life of a TrailblazerMatilda Arabella Evans was born four years after the abolition of slavery and raised on a family farm in eastern Aiken County. She was the first African American woman in South Carolina to obtain a medical license and fervently...

National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis's own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in...

"Breathtaking. [Rasmussen's] scholarly detective work reveals a fascinating narrative of slavery and resistance, but it also tells us something about history itself--about how fiction can become fact, and how 'history' is sometimes nothing more than...

"The Barn is the most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read...Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than...

The brave pioneers who made a life on the frontier were not only male--and they were not only white. The story of African-American women in the Old West is one that has largely gone untold until now. The stories of ten African-American women are...

Based upon exhaustive research in all presidential libraries from Hoover to Clinton, the voluminous archives of the African National Congress [ANC] at Fort Hare University in South Africa, along with allied archives of the NAACP, the Ford and Rockefeller...

A timely groundbreaking book in the vein of Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of the Well, one of the country's foremost voices on reparations, offers a radical and vital new framework going beyond the current debate over this controversial issue. For...

The remarkable story of how African Americans transformed Atlanta, the former heart of the Confederacy, into today's Black mecca   Atlanta is home to some of America's most prominent Black politicians, artists, businesses, and HBCUs. Yet, in...

A radical new vision of the nation's founding era and a major act of historical recovery Featuring more than 120 writers, this groundbreaking anthology reveals the astonishing richness and diversity of Black experience in the turbulent decades of the...

The phrase "stay woke" was introduced into the American lexicon by the talented Black musician Huddie William Ledbetter ("Lead Belly") in 1938 in a song called Scottsboro Boys. The Scottsboro Boys were nine young Black men unjustly imprisoned following...