General History

Who had the right to live within the newly united states of America?In the country's founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic,...

As resonant now as it ever was, this inspiring portrait by a loving daughter of a father whose pervasive common sense, folk wisdom, and untutored but right-on insights gave his children their road map to a better life is ready for a new generation of...

Journalist and author Mark Whitaker explores the momentous year that redefined the civil rights movement as a new sense of Black identity expressed in the slogan Black Power challenged the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis...

Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person...

An epic story, Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and...

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as "his" slave.In 1848, a year of international democratic...

For a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, a quarter of all Americans lived under a system of legalized segregation called Jim Crow. Together with its rigidly enforced canon of racial etiquette, these rules governed nearly every aspect of...

Pittsburgh Jazz documents the almost forgotten magic created in the city of Pittsburgh by a host of artists, uptown inner city streets, and jazz joints that served patrons from a menu packed full of delightful music. The magical improvised songs,...