History

Choose Witness Over WarIt's possible to be faithful in the public square without joining the culture war. In fact, there's a model. The Black church's social action tradition has long rejected the idea that overcoming polarization means moral compromise...

The boxing champion whose fight against the Nazis in and out of the ring made him a global icon During the 1930s and 1940s, no African American athlete commanded the spotlight more than heavyweight boxer Joe Louis. His 1938 knockout victory over German...

The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used...

The memory of the long civil rights movement often celebrates white men and women who drew on their religious faith to support Black demands for racial justice. However, the visions and actions of these leaders and their organizations often conflicted...

A gripping biography of a man who escaped slavery to become an influential abolitionist, famously known as the "King of the Underground Railroad" Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813-1872) was a fugitive from slavery, an abolitionist, and a minister, teacher,...

During the first quarter of the twenty-first century, more than one hundred institutions of higher education in the United States launched projects to study and share their histories concerning slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. Slavery,...

The first major book about an artist of powerful significance to twentieth-century Black and American art The artist Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007) was a community leader, mentor, and tireless recorder of the people and places of Boston, where he lived...

Unearthed truths, buried lives: Belvoir reveals the pain, resilience, and reckoning found beneath the soil of a Maryland plantation.Near Annapolis, Maryland, a former tobacco plantation dating to the 1730s holds centuries of untold history. In Belvoir: ...

Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century In A Brotherhood of Liberty, Dennis Patrick Halpin shifts the focus of the black freedom struggle from the Deep South to argue that...

The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project's dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental...

Available for the first time since 1978, The Harlem Book of the Dead showcases James Van Der Zee's unflinching creative visionOriginally published in 1978, The Harlem Book of the Dead is a haunting and beautiful document of Black funerary traditions in...

Explores four centuries of colonization, land divisions, and urban development around this historic landmark neighborhood in West Harlem It was the neighborhood where Alexander Hamilton built his country home, George Gershwin wrote his first hit, a young...