History

We Fought the Road is the story of the building of the Alaska-Canada Highway during World War II. More than one third of the 10,607 builders were black; thought to be incapable of performing on a war front by many of their white commanding officers...

In the 1970s, when the South Bronx burned and the promise of New Deal New York and postwar America gave way to despair, the people of Washington Heights at the northern tip of Manhattan were increasingly vulnerable. The Heights had long been a...

In 1791, President George Washington appointed a commission to build the future capital of the nation. The commission found paying masters of faraway Maryland plantations sixty dollars a year for their slaves made it easier to keep wages low for free...

The definitive book on Mexico City: a vibrant, seductive, and paradoxical metropolis-the second-biggest city in the world, and a vision of our urban future. First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of Mexico City, the largest metropolis in...

African Americans of Martha's Vineyard have an epic history. From the days when slaves toiled away in the fresh New England air, through abolition and Reconstruction and continuing into recent years, African Americans have fought arduously to preserve a...

The words of China's most famous political prisoner In Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. One of the incarcerated--whose sentence, unlike most others, has no end...

Frederick Douglass--famed author, orator and former slave--spent twenty-five years with his family in Rochester, New York, beginning in 1848. Despite living through one of our nation's most bitter and terrifying times, Frederick and his wife, Anna,...

A Finalist for The Governor General's Award for Nonfiction in CanadaIn this indelible memoir that recalls the life of her remarkable ninety-five-year old grandmother, Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam tells the story of modern Ethiopia--a nation that...

Aptly named for the area's rich land, Lower Richland County encompasses approximately 360 miles in the heart of South Carolina's geographic center.Discovered by Virginia settlers over 250 years ago, this fertile swath of land, with the Wateree River in...

For generations, African Americans have enriched South Carolina's history, and the black families of Chesterfield County are no different.During slavery, many African Americans in Chesterfield County were forced to provide domestic services and labor to...

A remarkable work of reportage by Nobel Prize Laureate V. S. Naipaul that surveys belief and religion among the disparate peoples of Africa. Like all of Naipaul's "travel" books, The Masque of Africa encompasses a much larger narrative and purpose: to...

Squatting offers a radical but simple solution to the crises of housing, homelessness and the lack of social space that mark contemporary society: occupying empty buildings and rebuilding lives and communities in the process. Squatting has a long and...