General History

New York City is blessed with an incredible array of public sculptures. One overlooked aspect of this collection is its monuments of Black Americans, each with its own remarkable story. The first appearance of a Black person in a city monument came in...

A moving and humane portrait of the abolitionist revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who led Haiti's fight for independence from French colonial rule "My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery," declared Jean-Jacques Dessalines as he...

After the Civil War, Black landownership in Fairfax County increased by leaps and bounds. By the 1870s, retired Union officers were purchasing land that they sold to African Americans like Joshua Ball, Joshua Pearson, Robert Bradley and John Coates...

By challenging the rules of enslavement and, later, pushing the boundaries of free citizenship in North Carolina, Lunsford Lane (1803-79) became a folk hero to many enslaved Southerners, as well as a generation of abolitionists. Author of a unique "slave...

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...

The first biography of Ericka Huggins, a queer Black woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party. In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered...

"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...

Originally published in 1916, this innovative peanut recipe book by prominent Black scientist George Washington Carver is just as delicious today. How many ways can you possibly prepare the peanut? At least 105, according to George Washington Carver. In...

A new way of seeing Black history--the sweeping story of how American cities as we know them developed from the vision, aspirations, and actions of the Black poor. Building the Black City shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for...

New neighborhoods began emerging north of Main Street in Spartanburg, South Carolina in the 1870s as emancipated Black men and women spent their hard-won post-slavery wages to purchase lots and build homes. As the decades rolled by, they and their...