History

Oakland's famous and vibrant arts heritage is known throughout the country, but many people are unaware of the extent of this city's contribution to the national stage in terms of music, dance, visual arts, and literature. Black Artists in Oakland...

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's...

"This book is a masterpiece. It captures the essence of the Tuskegee Airmen's experience from the perspective of one who lived it. The action sequences make me feel I'm back in the cockpit of my P-51C 'Kitten'! If you want to know what it was like...

The rise to power of one of Canada's most progressive municipal movements in recent memory. When it was dreamed up in the early 2000s by a transportation bureaucrat with a quixotic dream of bringing tramways back to the streets of Montreal, few expected...

New York City Jazz explores many of the haunts and hideaways that have played host to iconic jazz musicians and singers like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and Lester Young. Considered the jazz...

Lucy Ann Delaney, born Lucy Berry (c. 1830 - after 1891), was an African-American author, and activist, a former slave notable for her 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom. This is the only first-person account of...

Known as the birthplace of black capitalism, Richmond had one of the largest black business districts in America at the turn of the 20th century.Richmond, Virginia boasts a proud legacy of achievement among its African-American residents. Medical...

The incredible true story of the kidnapping, enslavement, and rescue of Solomon Northup in the era before the Civil War--now a major motion picture! In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free man living in Saratoga Springs, New York, making a living as a...

The Land Is Ours tells the story of South Africa's first black lawyers, who operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an age of aggressive colonial expansion, land dispossession and forced labour, these men believed in a...

“The most dramatic account so far of the extraordinary expeience of slaves in and after the American Revolution. . . . Schama's gift for plunging us into the very center of the action makes reading an exhilarating and often moving experience...

Louis Botha was prime minister of the Union of South Africa when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. As South Africa was a dominion of the British Empire, Botha was asked to lead his country on a campaign against the Germans across the border in...