General History

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 story of Black Fairfax has long been untold. The free Black population of Fairfax Court House dates to at least the 1820s. After the Civil War, newly freed Black citizens expanded the hamlet of Jermantown dramatically. Additional segregated...

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...

Critically acclaimed historian of slavery in the Americas The Reckoning offers the first rounded account of the rise and fall of the Second Slavery--largescale plantation slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, Cuba and the US South. Robin Blackburn shows...

As a cultural and political commentator, Stanley Crouch in unapologetically contentious and delightfully iconoclastic. Whether he is writing on the uniqueness of the American South, the death of Tupak Shakur, the O.J. Simpson verdict, or the damage done...

A kaleidoscopic account of the crack cocaine era and a community's ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic   The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the...

The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 Vanity Fair, Best Books of 2022 Booklist, Best Books of 2022 Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. ...

Cities are nothing without the streets--the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street, Jessica D. Klanderud documents the...