History

The Companion Volume to the PBS Television Series Wonders of the African World is an exuberant, visually stunning journey across Africa and through the history of its glorious but forgotten civilizations. Traveling by camel, by dhow, by Land Cruiser, and...

A complex character, angry and aggressive, James Murphy was not an easy husband or father. But all his children said "He made a God out of education." He had found education to be his gateway out of poverty, his way to leave a countryside still reeling...

Memphis has been an important city for African Americans in the South since the Civil War. They migrated from within Tennessee and from surrounding states to the urban crossroads in large numbers after emancipation, seeking freedom from the oppressive...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER For millennia, Carthage's triumph over Rome at Cannae in 216 B.C. has inspired reverence and awe. No general since has matched Hannibal's most unexpected, innovative, and brutal military victory. Now Robert L. O'Connell, one of the...

In a part of Egypt so parched that decades might pass between rainstorms, amid a sea of sand, is a green island--Dakhleh, the "everlasting oasis"--that may contain the whole of human history. In this extraordinary book, an acclaimed science writer and...

In its last decades, the apartheid regime was confronted with an existential threat. While internal resistance to the last whites-only government grew, mandatory international sanctions prohibited sales of strategic goods and arms to South Africa. To...

Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many - histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing saga of decolonization and state-building, conflict, economic problems, but also...

A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings' family explores America's racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors--both the enslaver and the enslaved.Gayle Jessup White had long heard the stories passed down from her father's...

"Paul Farmer brings his considerable intellect, empathy, and expertise to bear in this powerful and deeply researched account of the Ebola outbreak that struck West Africa in 2014. It is hard to imagine a more timely or important book." --Bill and...

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally...

A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy's anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade. The most feared ship in Britain's West Africa Squadron, His Majesty's brig...

One of South Africa's best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the...