African American Studies

The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now,...

The story of foster care in the United States is the story of the failure of the social safety net to aid poor, largely black, parents in their attempt to make a home for their children. Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before --...

2019 Foreword INDIES Finalist American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and...

Black women are the great American success story: they must acknowledge their power and then wield the hell out of it. Like a shadow's distended, colorless depiction of reality, the truth about Black women has been contorted. In POWER: THE RISE OF BLACK...

#1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks offers a new take on the Civil Rights Movement, stressing its unexpected use of military strategy and its lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world. In Waging a Good...

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law?In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow...

In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service recruited 623 African American men from Macon County, Alabama, for a study of "the effects of untreated syphilis in the Negro male." For the next 40 years--even after the development of penicillin, the cure for...

Reverend H. K. Matthews is one of the unsung heroes of the Southern civil rights movement. Among his activism, he participated in the first sit-in demonstrations in northwest Florida, and led a campaign against the use of Confederate symbols at an area...

The American Library Association presents a must-read banned book for every week of the year in this beautiful book lover's reading log.Expand your reading list and stand against literary censorship with this one-year reading challenge and book journal!...

For readers of Ace and Belly of the Beast A Black queer feminist exploration of asexuality--and an incisive interrogation of the sex-obsessed culture that invisibilizes and ignores asexual and A-spec identity. Everything you know about sex and asexuality...

So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE LUKAS BOOK PRIZE FOR EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, AARP, GREATER GOOD, AND INC. The End of Bias is a transformative, groundbreaking exploration...

The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay. As Heard on NPR's This American Life "Ross Gay's eye lands upon...

"A book that both taught me so much and also kept me on the edge of my seat. It is an invaluable text from a supremely talented writer." --Clint Smith, author of How the Word is PassedThe definitive history of the pervasiveness of racial inequality in...

The birth of acid house and club culture, as told by those who were there In 1987, four friends from London, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker, took a week-long holiday to Ibiza. What they saw there, and brought back home,...

From the creator of the award-winning TV series black-ish comes a collection of personal, hilarious, and provocative essays on what it's like to be black in America today. In THIS IS BASIC SH*T, Kenya Barris uses his own personal stories to talk about...