General History

'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking'Fara Dabhoiwala, Guardian'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history'Mihir Bose, Irish Times'Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and...

The #1 New York Times bestseller The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory history essential to our understanding of race,...

A fascinating, beautifully illustrated study of the daring war in East Africa waged by German colonial forces under Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck against the wide array of colonial and expeditionary forces of the Allied Powers. The East African Campaign in...

The USAAC's Tuskegee Experiment, designed to prove that African-Americans were not capable of flying combat aircraft, ironically resulted in the creation of one of the USAAF's elite units. Crewed by highly-educated and exceptionally motivated men, the...

Frank Lambert details America's nineteenth-century conflicts in the Middle East in The Barbary Wars.The history of America's conflict with the piratical states of the Mediterranean runs through the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and...

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd Jr., a forty-nine-year-old black man, was walking home from a party when three white men in a pickup truck offered him a ride. They drove Byrd out to a lonely country road, tied him to a logging chain, and dragged him three...

From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation's defense. This book breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as "buffalo soldiers" played in...

Post-independence events in the Republic of the Congo are a veritable Gordian knot. The ambitions of Congolese political leaders, Cold War rivalry, Pan- Africanism, Belgium's continued economic interests in the country's mineral wealth, and the strategic...

The epic story of the Boer War and Harry 'Breaker' Morant: drover, horseman, bush poet - murderer or hero? Most Australians have heard of the Boer War and of Harry 'Breaker' Morant, a figure who rivals Ned Kelly as an archetypal Australian folk hero. But...

In this provocative study, Stephen Howe traces the sources and ancestries of the Afrocentric movement, and closely analyses the writings of its leading proponents. Hard-hitting yet subtle and scholarly in its appraisal of Afrocentric ideas, and based on...

The founding Fathers based the American system on principles of equality and freedom, but often people who made America their home faced inequality, injustice, and legal discrimination. The Free and the Unfree documents what happened when Native...

The banjo has been called by many names over its history, but they all refer to the same sound--strings humming over skin--that has eased souls and electrified crowds for centuries. The Banjo invites us to hear that sound afresh in a biography of one of...