
- Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering
- Focusing on engineering programs in three settings—in Maryland, Illinois, and Texas, from the 1940s through the 1990s—Amy E. Slaton examines efforts to expand black opportunities in engineering as well as obstacles to those reforms. Slaton exposes the negative impact of conservative ideologies in engineering, and of specific institutional processes—ideas and practices that are as limiting for the field of engineering as they are for the goal of greater racial parity in the profession.
- Hardcover February 2010

- The Condemnation of Blackness
- Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
- Hardcover February 2010

- To Serve the Living
- For African Americans, death was never simply the end of life, and funerals were not just places to mourn. In the “hush harbors” of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long—and often violent—struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. To Serve the Living offers a fascinating history of how African American funeral directors have been integral to the fight for freedom.
- Hardcover February 2010

- Darker than Blue
- Paul Gilroy seeks to awaken a new understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois’ intellectual and political legacy. With his brilliant, provocative analysis and astonishing range of reference, Gilroy revitalizes the study of African American culture. He traces the shifting character of black intellectual and social movements, and shows how we can construct an account of moral progress that reflects today’s complex realities.
- Hardcover January 2010

- We Ain’t What We Ought To Be
- In this exciting revisionist history, Stephen Tuck traces the black freedom struggle in all its diversity, from the first years of freedom during the Civil War to President Obama’s inauguration. We Ain’t What We Ought To Be rejects the traditional narrative that identifies the Southern non-violent civil rights movement as the focal point of the black freedom struggle. Instead, it explores the dynamic relationships between those seeking new freedoms and those looking to preserve racial hierarchies, and between grassroots activists and national leaders.
- Hardcover January 2010

- The Two Hendricks
- In September 1755, the most famous Indian in the world—a Mohawk leader known in English as King Hendrick—died in the Battle of Lake George. Half a century earlier, another Hendrick worked with powerful leaders in the frontier town of Albany. Until recently the two Hendricks were thought to be the same person. Eric Hinderaker sets the record straight, reconstructing the lives of these two men in a compelling narrative that reveals the complexities of the Anglo-Iroquois alliance, a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial vision.
- Hardcover January 2010

- The Faithful
- Shaken by the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, and challenged from within by social and theological division, Catholics in America are at a crossroads. O’Toole tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.
- Paperback November 2009

- Jim Crow, American
- Jim Crow is the figure that has long represented America’s imperfect union. This compact edition of the earliest Jim Crow plays and songs presents essential performances that assembled backtalk, banter, masquerade, and dance into the diagnostic American style. They celebrate an irresistibly attractive blackness in a young Republic that had failed to come together until Americans agreed to disagree over Jim Crow’s meaning.
- Paperback November 2009

- Freedom Struggles
- For many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation.
- Hardcover November 2009

- Serving Their Country
- Over the twentieth century, American Indians fought for their right to be both American and Indian. In an illuminating book, Paul C. Rosier traces how Indians defined democracy, citizenship, and patriotism in both domestic and international contexts. Like African Americans, twentieth-century Native Americans served as a visible symbol of an America searching for rights and justice. American history is incomplete without their story.
- Hardcover November 2009

- Birthing a Slave
- Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations in the antebellum South, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. This is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.
- Paperback October 2009

- Disturbing the Peace
- W. C. Handy waking up to the blues on a train platform, Buddy Bolden eavesdropping on the drums at Congo Square, John Lomax taking his phonograph recorder into a southern penitentiary—in Disturbing the Peace, Bryan Wagner revises the history of the black vernacular tradition and gives a new account of black culture by reading these myths in the context of the tradition’s ongoing engagement with the law.
- Hardcover October 2009

- Poverty and Poverty Alleviation Strategies in North America
- Poverty and Poverty Alleviation Strategies in North America is a dialogue about poverty in North America, especially in Mexico and the United States. In this book, twelve poverty scholars in Mexico and the United States contribute to the understanding of the roots of poverty and build knowledge about effective policy alleviation strategies.
- Paperback October 2009

- The Art of Urbanism
- This volume explores how the royal courts of powerful Mesoamerican centers represented their kingdoms in architectural, iconographic, and cosmological terms. Scholars from archaeology, anthropology, art history, and religious studies contribute new perspectives to the understanding of ancient Mesoamericans’ view of their spectacular urban and ritual centers.
- Hardcover September 2009

- Blurring the Color Line
- Richard Alba argues that the social cleavages that separate Americans into distinct, unequal ethno-racial groups could narrow dramatically in the coming decades. In Blurring the Color Line, Alba explores a future in which socially mobile minorities could blur stark boundaries and gain much more control over the social expression of racial differences.
- Hardcover September 2009

- In the Shadow of Du Bois
- The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics.
- Hardcover September 2009

- Script and Glyph
The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca was created at a pivotal transitional moment, bridging an era when pictorial manuscripts dominated and one that witnessed the rising hegemony of alphabetic texts. Script and Glyph is a particularly appropriate volume for Dumbarton Oaks, as it crosses the boundaries of Pre-Columbian and Landscape areas of study. The volume is beautifully illustrated with color images from the manuscript itself.
- Hardcover September 2009 / Paperback September 2009

- No Place to Hide
Seventeen years after the civil war in El Salvador came to an end, violence and insecurity continue to shape the daily lives of many Salvadorans. This book examines the phenomenon of youth gangs, as well as related police abuse, clandestine violence, and their collective impact on the rule of law. The book’s findings are based on primary research conducted in El Salvador between 2006 and 2008.
- Paperback July 2009

- Symbols in Clay
In late prehistory, the ancestors of the present-day Hopi in Arizona created a unique and spectacular painted pottery tradition referred to as Hopi Yellow Ware. This ceramic tradition inspired Hopi potter Nampeyo’s revival pottery at the turn of the twentieth century. Extending the Peabody’s influential Awatovi project of the 1930s, Symbols in Clay calls into question deep-seated assumptions about pottery production and specialization in the precontact American Southwest.
- Paperback May 2009

- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. In an introductory essay, Robert Stepto re-examines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped from slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of America's most important writers. The John Harvard Library text reproduces the first edition, published in Boston in 1845.
- Paperback April 2009

- Becoming African Americans
Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.
- Hardcover March 2009

- Down a Narrow Road
The Uyghurs, a Turkic group, account for half the population of the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture. The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, Yining’s Uyghurs express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice.
- Hardcover March 2009

- The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom
Pulitzer Prize–winner Steven Hahn’s provocative new book challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the twentieth century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms. Throughout, Hahn presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense.
- Hardcover March 2009

- How Free Is Free?
- Despite two major efforts to reconstruct race relations, injustices remain. From the height of Jim Crow to the early twenty-first century, struggles over racism persist despite court decisions and legislation. Although a painful history to confront, Litwack’s book inspires as it probes the enduring story of racial inequality and the ongoing fight for freedom in black America.
- Hardcover February 2009

- Exiles at Home
- New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, Thompson illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.
- Hardcover February 2009

- Up from History
- This compelling biography reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Booker T. Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination.
- Hardcover January 2009

- The Latino Education Crisis
- Drawing on both extensive demographic data and compelling case studies, this book reveals the depths of the educational crisis looming for Latino students, the nation’s largest and most rapidly growing minority group.
- Hardcover January 2009

- Saltwater Slavery
- This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market. Saltwater Slavery is animated by deep research and gives us a graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.
- Paperback December 2008

- Migration Miracle
- Migration Miracle humanizes the immigration controversy by exploring the harsh realities of the migrants’ desperate journeys. Drawing on over 300 interviews with men, women, and children, Hagan focuses on an unexplored dimension of the migration undertaking—the role of religion and faith in surviving the journey.
- Hardcover November 2008

- Your Spirits Walk Beside Us
- Even before the emergence of the civil rights movement, African American religion and progressive politics were assumed to be inextricably intertwined. Savage counters this assumption with the story of a highly diversified religious community whose debates over engagement in the struggle for racial equality were as vigorous as they were persistent.
- Hardcover November 2008