General History

A centennial celebration of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and its vital role in the development of Black Studies In 1926, the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg's collection of four thousand books, pamphlets, papers, and...

When nineteen-year-old Prince took the stage to perform "I Wanna Be Your Lover" on American Bandstand, those who watched couldn't reconcile how Prince's funky disco-pop sounds had hailed from a place like Minneapolis. But the Minneapolis Sound, Prince's...

This stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees. The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black...

For readers of The Sum of Us and South to America, an essential new look at the roots of American inequality--and the seeds of its transformation Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country's economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a...

"I loved this book.... I looked forward to [it] more than any other in a long time, and Howard Bryant exceeded my great expectations. Kings and Pawns is brilliantly conceived and powerfully written." -- David Maraniss, author of Path Lit by LightningA...

An absorbing investigation into a little-known historical tragedy--an insurrection which upended a resilient and wealthy Black community who found themselves in the clutches of an insurrection at the turn of the twentieth century in Laurinburg, North...

During a dramatic three-day period in March 1961, nine students from historically Black Tougaloo College staged sit-ins at the all-White Main Library in Jackson, Mississippi. The students conducted their protest and were arrested, held in jail overnight,...

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...