African American Studies

Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be "smart enough," using technology to promote democracy and equity.Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that...

For more than two millennia, African blacksmiths have transformed one of Earth's most basic natural resources into objects of life-changing utility, empowerment, prestige, spiritual potency, and astonishing artistry--shaping African cultures in the most...

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST Compelling, insightful and important, Beneath a Ruthless Sun exposes the corruption of racial bigotry and animus that shadows a community, a state and a nation. A fascinating examination of an...

With its beautiful beaches and golf courses, the island of the Dominican Republic is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Caribbean. Yet when missionary priest Fr. Christopher Hartley arrived in the country in 1997, he discovered another...

Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is "a bracing corrective to a national mythology" (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become...

To be a moral witness is perhaps the highest calling of journalism, and in this unforgettable, highly readable account of contemporary slavery, author Benjamin Skinner travels around the globe to personally tell stories that need to be told -- and heard...

In the 1970s, when the South Bronx burned and the promise of New Deal New York and postwar America gave way to despair, the people of Washington Heights at the northern tip of Manhattan were increasingly vulnerable. The Heights had long been a...

The "science" of eugenics--by which the genetic makeup of a population is controlled by who does and doesn't reproduce--is forever tied in popular memory with Nazi Germany. But the practice began in late 19th-century England, and was widely embraced in...

In 1791, President George Washington appointed a commission to build the future capital of the nation. The commission found paying masters of faraway Maryland plantations sixty dollars a year for their slaves made it easier to keep wages low for free...

The definitive book on Mexico City: a vibrant, seductive, and paradoxical metropolis-the second-biggest city in the world, and a vision of our urban future. First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of Mexico City, the largest metropolis in...

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award Seen as a pioneering figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to...