History

An Oxford professor of archaeology explores the unique history of magic--the oldest and most neglected strand of human behavior and its resurgence today Three great strands of belief run through human history: Religion is the relationship with one god...

During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants...

Patrice Lumumba (1925-61) was one of the most famous leaders of the African Independence Movement. After his murder, he became an icon of anti-imperialist struggle, and his picture, along with those of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was brandished around...

Algiers is the second-oldest neighborhood in the city of New Orleans and stretches 12 miles from Riverview to the Cut Off. A rural area, in comparison to the inner city of New Orleans, Algiers's land was cleared by African slaves, and plantation homes...

A modern Cinderella must defend her fairy-tale marriage in a scandal that rocked jazz-age America. When Alice Jones, a former domestic, married Leonard Rhinelander in 1924, she became the first black woman to be listed in the Social Register as a member...

Though you may not know the man, you probably know his music. Arkansas-born Louis Jordan's songs like Baby, It's Cold Outside," "Caldonia" and "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" can still be heard today, decades since Jordan ruled the charts. In his five

People of African descent were some of Galveston's earliest residents, and although they came to the island enslaved, they retained mastery of their culinary traditions. As Galveston's port prospered and became the Wall Street of the South, better job...

Africa is struggling whilst western political correctness has gone mad. Its insanity props up autocrats who are controlling uncontrollably. Blind eyes are turned on the causes of the African refugees' plight, as millions flee annihilation along their...

In 1992 Smithsonian anthropologist Michael Atwood Mason traveled to Cuba for initiation as a priest into the Santería religion. Since then he has created an active oricha "house" and has initiated five others as priests. He is a rare combination: a...

Frederick Douglass's fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to freedom. Nevertheless, when these differing self-presentations are...

First published in 1962, Lincoln and the Negro was the first book to examine in detail how Lincoln faced the problem of the status of black people in American democracy, and it remains unsurpassed. Starting with Lincoln's childhood attitudes, Benjamin...

The year 1964 produced a watershed in American race relations. In one of the civil rights movement's most dramatic initiatives, thousands of Northern white college students were recruited to come south that summer in an effort to "break" Mississippi and...