General History

FINALIST FOR THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD "Raucously immersive...An intimate portrait of Black opulence in the early 20th century." --Oprah Daily A "scintillating, vibrant" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and deeply researched biography of A'Lelia...

Born enslaved in Virginia in 1836, Thomas Lewis Johnson refused to let bondage define the course of his life. Secretly teaching himself to read and write, and later finding faith through an evangelical conversion, Johnson charted a path of resilience...

During the Jim Crow era, Black activists appealed to a diverse population of migrating Black Americans by making them viscerally feel that the threat of anti-Black violence continued to afflict them as a group and to undergird blackness itself. To this...

During the Jim Crow era, Black activists appealed to a diverse population of migrating Black Americans by making them viscerally feel that the threat of anti-Black violence continued to afflict them as a group and to undergird blackness itself. To this...

Huey P. Newton was called many things in his time: revolutionary, genius, criminal, even the most surveilled human being in world history. Yet, little is known about him still because of persistent distortions to his name and legacy as co-founder of the...

A look at the efforts of two generations of Black Philadelphians to turn the City of Brotherly Love into a place of promise and opportunity for all, reissued with a new preface that continues the story of civil rights activism in Philadelphia up to the...

A long-forgotten Black abolitionist who liberated captive workers by the wagonload, brilliantly satirized slaveholders, and gave the underground railroad its name. Thomas Smallwood was a shoemaker by day and an organizer of mass escapes from slavery by...

A. J. Cade's Death or Victory offers the first in-depth history of the Louisiana Native Guards, pioneering African American regiments within the Union army. Originating as a division of the New Orleans Home Guards in May 1861, the Native Guards consisted...

A FORGOTTEN EPISODE FROM THE ERA OF RECONSTRUCTION: An extraordinary American hero travels to the nation's capital to tell an unforgettable story of violence, resistance, and social action in the post-Civil War South. For Black History Month, the...

Williams fought a good fight for a better democracy and the collective equal rights of African Americans. He was not just a revolutionary voice and internationalist leader and voice in the Black Power movement, and should not be forgotten or dismissed...

The page-turning and revelatory true story of America's disastrous 1835 attack on the Seminoles in pre-statehood Florida, and the two men--a Black American and a renowned Indigenous warrior--who fought back for their homes and freedom, from the author of...

On its one-hundredth anniversary, a powerful and essential meditation on the origins, evolution, and future of Black History Month from one of America's leading historians of Black education and the author of American Grammar. In I'll Make Me a World,...