History

Convicted of the rape of a white woman in Mississippi, Willie McGee was executed in 1951, and the mysteries surrounding his case live on in this provocative tale about justice in the deep South. A gripping saga of race and retribution in the Deep South...

Newark's volatile past is infamous. The city has become synonymous with the Black Power movement and urban crisis. Its history reveals a vibrant and contentious political culture punctuated by traditional civic pride and an understudied tradition of...

It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms carceral apartheid...

No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Frederick Douglass's Narrative. In an introductory essay, Robert B. Stepto reexamines the extraordinary life and achievement of a...

An inside look at the music born, bred, and perfected in Chicago.Chicago house music originated in the city's Black, gay underground in the late seventies and became one of the most popular musical genres in the world by the end of the century. In...

#1 New York Times Bestseller"Medgar Evers deserves a place alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King in our historical memory. Evers, with Myrlie as his partner in activism and in life, was doing civil rights work in the single most hostile and dangerous...

With brilliantly objective scholarship, respected historian and author John G. Jackson reexamines the outdated, racist, and Westernized history of Africa that is still taught in schools, and presents one infinitely more rich, colorful, varied-and...

I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader is a timely and essential collection of the many works of Professor Gerald Horne--a historian who has made an indelible impact on the study of US and international history. Horne approaches his study of history as a...

A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history...

In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth (Liss) was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth enslaver in just twenty-two years. Leaving behind a small child she had...

A fascinating, first-person account of a historic era in the struggle for black empowerment in America.Long an iconic figure for radicals, Huey Newton is now being discovered by those interested in the history of America's social movements. Was he a...

'An empowering read . . . it is refreshing to see somebody celebrate the role that black Britons have played in this island's long and complicated history' DAVID LAMMY, author of Tribes, in 'The best books of 2020', the Guardian 'Timely and so important ...

More than 50 elders share their remarkable experiences of being Black in America in a collection of powerful photographs and interviews For so long, too many stories that reveal what it means and feels like to be Black in America have been overlooked...

"A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism."--Publishers Weekly "The eighteenth-century essays published for the first time in Who's Black and Why? contain a world of ideas--theories, inventions, and fantasies--about what blackness...