General History

From a Bancroft Prize winner, a harrowing portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation's hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city...

Ohio was at the heart of it all.During a dark time in United States history, thousands of freedom seekers traveled the Underground Railroad through Ohio. The Buckeye State hosted about half of all fugitive slave traffic of the antebellum era. A mix of...

In 1924, the Virginia State Legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act.The act banned interracial marriage down to a single drop of African blood. Just three months later, Curtis W. Harris was born in Dendron, Virginia. Harris was the sixth child of...

The story of Raleigh's African American communities begins before the Civil War.Towns like Oberlin Village were built by free people of color in the antebellum era. During Reconstruction, the creation of thirteen freedmen's villages defined the racial...

A Hidden History of Unequal AccessDuring the Jim Crow era, many public libraries were segregated. The public library plays a fundamental role in communities by providing free educational resources, boosting literacy and knowledge, and serving as a place...

First published in 2007, the groundbreaking book Finding Freedom provided the first narrative account of the life of Joshua Glover, the freedom seeker who was famously broken out of jail by thousands of Wisconsin abolitionists in 1854. This paperback...

A riveting and illuminating exploration of the transatlantic slave trade by an intrepid team of divers seeking to reclaim the stories of their ancestorsFrom the writers behind the acclaimed documentary series Enslaved, starring Samuel L. Jackson, comes a...

The second volume of The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass traced the career of this outstanding leader of the Negro people during the crucial decade, 1850-1860. In that volume was presented Douglass' incisive analysis of the strategy and tactics...

This oral history portrays the lives of African American women who migrated from the rural South to work as domestic servants in Washington, DC in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Living In, Living Out Elizabeth Clark-Lewis narrates the...

Step backstage in this look at little-known and utterly fascinating aspects of Jazz Age Louisiana.New Orleans' early jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory and Buddy Bolden had fascinating careers, but Hidden History of Louisiana's...

Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction One of Time Magazines's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 Finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards, Best History & Biography 2020 Longlisted for the 2020 Porchlight Business Book Awards An entertaining quest to...