General History

Intimate, in-depth portraits, interviews, and essays of America's black leaders--from the founding of the nation and Frederick Douglass to the 2008 presidential race and Barack Obama. Each figure is interconnected with the next, exploring themes of...

Few Americans know the history-changing story of the men of the USS Mason, the only African-American sailors to take a World War II warship into combat. At a time when most blacks in the Navy were relegated to stewards or laborers, the crew of the USS...

A glimpse into the legacy of the "chief of chiefs." Robert Nathanial Lee, known as Chief Robbe, was the first and only person to be named "chief of chiefs" by the Mardi Gras Indian Council. From his birth in 1915, Chief Robbe faced hardship and...

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award An award-winning constitutional law historian examines case-based evidence of the court's longstanding racial bias (often under the guise of states rights) to reveal how that prejudice has allowed the court to...

In Black Skin is a reflective and illustrative poetry collection that takes the reader on a lyrical journey from Black enslavement in America to the Black Lives Matter movement. This literary work, divided into five chapters and inspired by actual...

Freedom Seekers reveals the hidden stories of Britain's enslaved people and their liberation. This book brings the history of slavery in England to light, revealing the powerful untold stories of resistance by enslaved workers from Africa, South Asia,...

Most accounts of Nigeria's colonisation were written by British officials, presenting it as a noble civilising mission to rid Africans of barbaric superstition and corrupt tribal leadership. Thanks to this skewed writing of history, many Nigerians today...

A landmark anthology of full-length works by Black American women writers of the 19th century including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Weston Fordham-edited and with an introduction by C.S.R. Calloway.Shadows Uplifted collects and...

An award-winning historian on the transformative year in the sixties that continues to reverberate in our lives and politics--for readers of Heather Cox Richardson. If 1968 marked a turning point in a pivotal decade, 1964--or rather, the long 1964, from...

The fascinating and very moving story of the lovers, lawyers, judges and activists behind the groundbreaking Supreme Court case that led to one of the most important, national civil rights victories in decades--the legalization of same-sex marriage.In...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Friday Night Lights, the heart-wrenching and hilarious true story of an American city on its knees and a man who will do anything to save it. A Prayer for the City is acclaimed journalist Buzz Bissinger's true...

In the words of an African American conductor on the Underground Railroad, His Promised Land is the unusual and stirring account of how the war against slavery was fought--and sometimes won. John P. Parker (1827--1900) told this dramatic story to a...

How two Vietnam POWs, one white and one black, formed an unexpected friendship that saved them both: "A moving story." -- John McCainFred Cherry was one of the few black pilots taken prisoner by the Vietnamese, tortured and intimidated by captors who...

An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors "[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy...

An Imperfect God is a major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slaveryWhen George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves...

The story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets More than a hundred years ago, French troops fired the first tear gas grenades at the German enemy. Designed to force people out from cover, tear gas causes tearing and gagging,...