History

What does it mean to be deemed promising in an unjust world? The award-winning poet and MIT Distinguished Chair of the Humanities interrogates this question--and offers a more expansive vision of giftedness--in this striking, original work. "The People...

On its one-hundredth anniversary, a powerful and essential meditation on the origins, evolution, and future of Black History Month from one of America's leading historians of Black education and the author of American Grammar. In I'll Make Me a World,...

The dramatic and heartrending true story of one remarkable young man's account of love in the time of war, by a celebrated historian of untold Black stories On the eve of World War II, a handsome young scholar arrived in Paris. The queer, Black son of a...

A history of Black poets in Washington, DC, reveals how they have reflected and transformed American cultural discourseWashington, DC, has long been home to a dynamic and vibrant African American literary community, despite often being overshadowed by...

Gerald Massey's work has become essential for readers seeking a balanced understanding of human origins, religious thought and belief, and the role of Africa in world history. Massey, born in England (1828-1907), was at once a poet, Shakespearean...

Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing...

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain's beloved yet polarizing literary figure "Astute. . . . Sheds new light on a much-studied character."--Publishers Weekly Mark Twain's Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd,...

We Rode the Rhythms as One offers readers an immersive journey into the life and legacy of one of America's most unorthodox and inspiring poets. More than just a literary analysis, this book captures the pulse of Etheridge Knight's life, weaving together...

As a member of the integrated Women's Army Corps, Private First Class Sarah Keys served her country as a receptionist at Fort Dix, New Jersey. When she boarded a bus home to North Carolina in 1952, she never expected to be arrested and charged with...

A revolutionary work of erasure poetry that exposes the contradictions in Thomas Paine's Common Sense--calling for a new definition of citizenship that embraces all Americans In his famous cry for inhabitants of the thirteen colonies to seek independence...

As a member of the integrated Women's Army Corps, Private First Class Sarah Keys served her country as a receptionist at Fort Dix, New Jersey. When she boarded a bus home to North Carolina in 1952, she never expected to be arrested and charged with...

A magisterial, groundbreaking new study of the lives of enslaved Americans on the cusp of the Civil War that places them--and their hard-won political knowledge--rightly at the center of the fight for freedom The enduring image of American slavery has...