History

Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2025 BookRiot's Best Books of 2025 NPR's New Books to Read Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Feminist Book A crucial telling of U.S. history centering the Black women whose magic gave rise to the rich tapestry of American...

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only...

A centennial celebration of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and its vital role in the development of Black Studies In 1926, the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg's collection of four thousand books, pamphlets, papers, and...

From a preeminent King scholar, the origin story of the man, minister, and civil rights hero who would lead the nation and change the world.We know who Martin Luther King, Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform...

An exploration of how African American innovators and artists--whose impact and financial value in American music, movies, and TV is disproportionately greater than their numbers--have fought for and often won the rights to own and benefit from their own...

The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay. Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair. From the two-time...

Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for NonfictionThe New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and...

From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy  1981. New York City is...

When nineteen-year-old Prince took the stage to perform "I Wanna Be Your Lover" on American Bandstand, those who watched couldn't reconcile how Prince's funky disco-pop sounds had hailed from a place like Minneapolis. But the Minneapolis Sound, Prince's...

Landscapes are key to the Black Atlantic. The history of how Africans and their descendants populated and transformed nations, regions, and ecosystems has always been attentive to the multiple meanings embedded in the landscapes of the Atlantic rim. More...

This stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees. The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black...

For readers of The Sum of Us and South to America, an essential new look at the roots of American inequality--and the seeds of its transformation Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country's economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a...