- Africa and Its Explorers
- Paperback
- African American Midwifery in the South
- Starting at the turn of the century, most African American midwives in the South were gradually excluded from reproductive health care. Gertrude Fraser shows how physicians, public health personnel, and state legislators mounted a campaign ostensibly to improve maternal and infant health, especially in rural areas. They brought traditional midwives under the control of a supervisory body, and eventually eliminated them.
- Hardcover 1998
- African American Women and Christian Activism
- When the middle class black women of Judith Weisenfeld's history organized a black chapter of the Young Women's Christian Association in 1905, it was a clear step toward establishing a suitable environment for young working women. Weisenfeld's account gives a vibrant picture of African American women as significant actors in the life of New York. It also bears telling witness to the religious, class, gender, and racial negotiations so often involved in American social reform movements.
- Hardcover 1998
- African-American Newspapers and Periodicals
- With a Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- The authentic voice of African-American culture is captured in this first comprehensive guide to a treasure trove of writings by and for a people, as found in sources in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. This bibliography contains over 6,000 entries.
- Hardcover 1999
- American Apartheid
- This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities.
- Paperback 1998 / Hardcover
- American Congo
- This is the story of how rural black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Delta planters, aided by local law enforcement, engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American black experience.
- Hardcover 2003
- American Mediterranean
- How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers and examines how the Southern elite connected—by travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquest—with the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
- Loury describes a vicious cycle of tainted social information that has resulted in a self-replicating pattern of racial stereotypes that rationalize and sustain discrimination. His analysis shows how the restrictions placed on black development by stereotypical and stigmatizing racial thinking deny a whole segment of the population the possibility of self-actualization that American society reveres--something that many contend would be undermined by remedies such as affirmative action. On the contrary, this book persuasively argues that the promise of fairness and individual freedom and dignity will remain unfulfilled without some forms of intervention based on race.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2003
- Barbaric Traffic
- Studying the rhetoric of various antislavery genres, Gould exposes the close relation between antislavery writings and commercial capitalism. By distinguishing between good commerce, or the importing of commodities that refined manners, and bad commerce, like the slave trade, the literature offered both a critique and an outline of acceptable forms of commercial capitalism. A challenge to the premise that objections to the slave trade were rooted in modern laissez-faire capitalism, Gould's work revises--and expands--our understanding of antislavery literature as a form of cultural criticism in its own right.
- Hardcover 2003
- Becoming Free in the Cotton South
- This book challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.
- Hardcover 2007
- 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.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Black Atlantic
- There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality.
- Paperback / Hardcover
- Black Columbiad
- What finding the New World meant to those who never sought it, and how they made the hostile, unfamiliar continent their own, is the subject of this volume, the first truly international collection of essays on African American literature and culture. Distinguished scholars, critics, and writers from around the world gather here to examine a great variety of moments that have defined the African American experience.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback
- The Black Hearts of Men
- Drawing on the largest extant bi-racial correspondence in the Civil War era, this book braids together Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and John Brown's struggles to reconcile ideals of justice with the reality of slavery and oppression. As the nation headed toward armed conflict, these men waged their own war by establishing model interracial communities, forming a new political party, and embracing a malleable and "black-hearted" self that was capable of violent revolt against a slaveholding nation.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- Black Identities
- The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- Black Jacks
- Jeffrey Bolster, master mariner and historian, shatters the myth that black seafaring in the age of sail was limited to the Middle Passage. Rescuing African American seamen from obscurity, this stirring account reveals the critical role sailors played in helping forge new identities for black people in America. An epic tale of the rise and fall of black seafaring, Black Jacks is African Americans' freedom story presented from a fresh perspective.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- Black Rice
- Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. It accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Born in Bondage
- Following the life cycle of a child from birth through youth to young adulthood, Marie Jenkins Schwartz explores the daunting world of American slave children, a world governed by the dual authority of parent and owner, each with conflicting agendas. Schwartz counters the commonly held vision of the paternalistic slaveholder who determines the life and welfare of his passive chattel, showing instead how slaves struggled to give their children a sense of self and belonging that denied the owner complete control.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- Bright Radical Star
- Hardcover
- Brotherhoods of Color
- From the time the first tracks were laid in the early nineteenth century, the railroad has occupied a crucial place in America's historical imagination. Now, for the first time, Arnesen gives us an untold piece of that vital American institution--the story of African Americans on the railroad. African Americans have been a part of the railroad from its inception, but today they are largely remembered as Pullman porters and track layers. The real history is far richer, a tale of endless struggle, perseverance, and partial victory.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery
- Challenging the boundaries of slavery ultimately brought on the Civil War and the unexpected, immediate emancipation of slaves long before it could have been achieved in any other way. This imaginative and fascinating book puts slavery into a brilliant new light and underscores anew the desperate human tragedy lying at the very heart of the American story.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- A Class of Their Own
- In this major undertaking, civil rights historian Adam Fairclough chronicles the odyssey of black teachers in the South from emancipation in 1865 to integration one hundred years later. A Class of Their Own is indispensable for understanding how blacks and whites interacted after the abolition of slavery, and how black communities coped with the challenges of freedom and oppression.
- Hardcover 2007
- Clinging to Mammy
- Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya's stories expose the power and reach of this myth, not only in advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Cold War and the Color Line
- The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths--Southern Africa and the American South--as the primary sites of white authority's last stand. He reveals America's efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2003
- Dancing in the Street
- Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr.; dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas; facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the civil rights movement and the politics of the time.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- Degrees of Freedom
- As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, they diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
- Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor
Contemporary Afro–American theatre is an exciting spectacle of an emerging black identity during a period when blacks have come to the forefront of political activity in the United States. Geneviève Fabre brings us the vast and rich production of black drama since 1945, placing it in historical and cultural context as a platform for political statement. Two strains emerge: the militant theatre of protest, and the ethnic theatre of black experience.
- Hardcover 1983
- Enter the New Negroes
- With the appearance of the urban, modern, diverse "New Negro" in the Harlem Renaissance, writers and critics began a vibrant debate on the nature of African-American identity, community, and history. Nadell offers an illuminating new perspective on the period and the decades immediately following it in a fascinating exploration of the neglected role played by visual images of race in that debate.
- Hardcover 2004
- 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 2009
- A Fool's Errand
- Paperback
- Forging Freedom
- This book is the first to trace the good and bad fortunes, over more than a century, of the earliest large free black community in the United States. Gary Nash shows how blacks in the City of Brotherly Love struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational competence, organize churches, establish neighborhoods and social networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children in schools, forge a political consciousness, and train black leaders who would help abolish slavery.
- Hardcover 1988 / Paperback 1991
- The Forgotten Fifth
- As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of the country's population was African American. The experiences of these men and women have been largely ignored in the accounts of the colonies' glorious quest for freedom. In this compact volume, Gary B. Nash reorients our understanding of early America, and reveals the perilous choices of the founding fathers that shaped the nation's future. The Forgotten Fifth is a powerful story of the nation's multiple, and painful, paths to freedom.
- Hardcover 2006
- From Protest to Politics
- Paperback 1998 / Hardcover
- Generations of Captivity
- Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans have a singular vision of slavery, fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Berlin offers a major reinterpretation in which slavery was made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004
- The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White
- By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover
- The Harvard Guide to African-American History
- This landmark guide covers research into every aspect of African-American life and work, offering a compendium of information and interpretation about almost 400 years of African-Americans's experiences as an ethnic group and as Americans. A companion CD-ROM packaged with the book makes more than 15,000 bibliography entries available for computer searching.
- Mixed 2001
- 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 2009
- In Search of Africa
- In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returned to Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. Diawara's journey gives us the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and above all for an Africa that is struggling to find its future.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- In Search of Nella Larsen
- Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook, Nella Larsen lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. Her writings about that life, briefly celebrated in her time, were lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many. In his search for Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding her, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities.
- Hardcover 2006
- In Struggle
- With its radical ideology and effective tactics, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the cutting edge of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. This sympathetic yet even-handed book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC's evolution, of its successes and its difficulties in the ongoing struggle to end white repression.
- Paperback 1995
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- This enlarged edition of the most significant and celebrated slave narrative now completes the Jacobs family saga, surely one of the most memorable in all of American history. John Jacobs's short slave narrative, "A True Tale of Slavery," published in London in 1861, adds a brother's perspective to Harriet Jacobs's own autobiography. It is an exciting addition to this now classic work, as John Jacobs presents additional historical information about family life so well described already by his sister.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2000
- Independent Africa
- In this book, an expanded version of The Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1966, Mr. Gower first looks at some of the legacies of colonialism inherited by those nations of Tropical Africa which recently gained independence from Britain.
- Hardcover 1967
- Integration or Separation?
- Integrated in principle, segregated in fact: is this the legacy of fifty years of "progress" in American racial policy? Is there hope for much better? Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law and a writer on matters of race and civil rights, says with frank clarity what few will admit--integration hasn't worked and possibly never will. Equally, he casts doubt on the solution that many African-Americans and mainstream whites have advocated: total separation of the races. This book presents Brooks's strategy for a middle way between the increasingly unworkable extremes of integration and separation.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1999
- Kpele Lala
- Paperback 1971
- Liberating Voices
- Hardcover 1991
- Many Thousands Gone
- Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life traces the evolution of black society in America from its creation in the early seventeenth century through the American Revolution. Berlin presents a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, revealing the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- The Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months
- This remarkable document--the first African American biography and a work that predates Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by almost thirty years--is a lost treasure from the annals of African American history. Susan Paul's portrayal of James Jackson's Christian sensibility, his idealism, and his racial awareness emphasizes his humanity and exemplary American character over his racial identity, even as it embeds him in his African American community.
- Paperback 2000 / Hardcover 2000
- A Nation under Our Feet
- This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people--an embryonic black nation. As Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- New States in the Modern World
- New States in the Modern World is probably the first book to consider new states in relationship to their effect on world political order. This volume of original essays focuses on the origins and current status of the new African states and one Arab-African state, Egypt. This book takes a major step on the road to such redefinition.
- Hardcover 1975
- Nikolai Leskov
- Hardcover 1977
- No Coward Soldiers
- In a vibrant and passionate exploration of the twentieth-century civil rights and black power eras in American history, Martin uses cultural politics as a lens through which to understand the African-American freedom struggle. In the transformative postwar period, the intersection between culture and politics became increasingly central to the African-American fight for equality. In freedom songs, in the exuberance of an Aretha Franklin concert, in Faith Ringgold's exploration of race and sexuality, the personal and social became the political.
- Hardcover 2005
- Northern Protest
- Hardcover
- On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs
- Hardcover 1925
- Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
- This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry. With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.
- Hardcover 2006
- Playing in the Dark
- Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature.
- Hardcover 1992
- Politics in Rhodesia
- Hardcover
- The Practice of Diaspora
- A pathbreaking work of scholarship that will reshape our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, The Practice of Diaspora revisits black transnational culture in the 1920s and 1930s, paying particular attention to links between intellectuals in New York and their Francophone counterparts in Paris. Brent Edwards suggests that diaspora is less a historical condition than a set of practices: the claims, correspondences, and collaborations through which black intellectuals pursue a variety of international alliances.
- Paperback 2003 / Hardcover 2003
- The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century
- "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, and his words have proven sadly prophetic. As we enter the twenty-first century, the problem remains--and yet it, and the line that defines it, have shifted in subtle but significant ways. This brief book speaks powerfully to the question of how the circumstances of race and racism have changed in our time--and how these changes will affect our future.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Race Men
- A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society--and how they exclude women altogether. A powerful statement by a major voice among black feminists, Race Men holds out the hope that by understanding how society has relied upon affirmations of masculinity to resolve social and political crises, we can learn to transcend them.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- Race Mixing
- Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.
- Hardcover 2003
- Raising Cain
- Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to consider, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- The Reaper's Garden
- What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper's Garden, Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America--and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.
- Hardcover 2008
- A Right to Sing the Blues
- "Black-Jewish relations," Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made "Black" music in the first few decades of this century.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Righteous Discontent
- What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham's nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women's groups.
- Paperback / Hardcover
- Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900
- Lane offers a historical explanation for the rising levels of black urban crime and family instability during this paradoxical era. Modern crime rates and patterns are shown to be products of a historical culture that can be traced from its formative years. The author not only charts Philadelphia's story but also makes suggestions regarding national and international patterns.
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback
- 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.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- Satchmo Blows Up the World
- At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism. Von Eschen captures the fascinating interplay between the efforts of the State Department and the progressive agendas of the artists themselves, as all struggled to redefine a more inclusive and integrated American nation on the world stage.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
- Searching for the Invisible Man
- Though centered on a single Jamaican sugar estate, and dealing largely with the period of formal slavery, this book is firmly placed in far wider contexts of place and time. The "Invisible Man" of the title is found, in the end, to be not just the formal slave but the ordinary black worker throughout the history of the plantation system.
- Hardcover 1978
- Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
- It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives.
- Paperback 1991
- Shadrach Minkins
- In 1851 Shadrach Minkins, the first runaway to be arrested in New England under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, became the catalyst of one of the most dramatic episodes of rebellion and legal wrangling before the Civil War. In a feat of historical sleuthing, Gary Collison restores an extraordinary chapter to American history and also offers an engrossing picture of the life of an ordinary black man in nineteenth-century North America.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- Slave Country
- This book tells the tragic story of the expansion of slavery in the new United States. In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery gradually disappeared from the northern states and the importation of captive Africans was prohibited. Yet, at the same time, the country's slave population grew, new plantation crops appeared, and several new slave states joined the Union. Rothman explores how slavery flourished in a new nation dedicated to the principle of equality among free men, and reveals the enormous consequences of U.S. expansion into the region that became the Deep South.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- Slave Patrols
- This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, nature, and extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- Soul by Soul
- Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- The Southern Past
- Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
- Staging Race
- Drawing extensively on black newspapers and commentary of the period, Karen Sotiropoulos shows how black performers and composers participated in a politically charged debate about the role of the expressive arts in the struggle for equality. Despite the racial violence, disenfranchisement, and the segregation of virtually all public space, they used America's new businesses of popular entertainment as vehicles for their own creativity and as spheres for political engagement.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
- Stagolee Shot Billy
- Although his story has been told countless times--by performers from Ma Rainey, Cab Calloway, and the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and Taj Mahal--no one seems to know who Stagolee really is. How the legend grew is a story in itself, and Cecil Brown tracks it through variants of the song "Stack Lee"--from early ragtime versions of the '20s right up to the hip-hop renderings of the '90s. Brown describes the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004
- Still the Promised City?
- Still the Promised City? addresses the question of why African-Americans have fared so poorly in securing unskilled jobs in the postwar era and why new immigrants have done so well. This insightful book uses New York as a prism to examine the changing relationships among race, immigration, and social mobility. Roger Waldinger's analysis offers a new understanding of America's most serious social problem and fresh approaches to attacking it.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1999
- Stories of Freedom in Black New York
- This book re-creates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2007
- Suffer the Future
- Hardcover 1980
- To 'Joy My Freedom
- In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter weaves a rich tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War South. Using a variety of sources, Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- To Stand and Fight
- The story of the civil rights movement typically begins with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and culminates with the 1965 voting rights struggle in Selma. But as Martha Biondi shows, a grassroots struggle for racial equality in the urban North began a full ten years before the rise of the movement in the South. To Stand and Fight demonstrates how black New Yorkers launched the modern civil rights struggle and left a rich legacy.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- 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 2009
- We Who Are Dark
- We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity. Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- What Blood Won't Tell
- Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Work of Democracy
- By carefully tracing the public lives of Ralph Bunche, Kenneth Clark, and Lorraine Hansberry, Keppel illuminates how the mainstream media selectively appropriated the most challenging themes and goals of the struggle for racial equality so that difficult questions about the relationship between racism and American democracy could be softened, if not entirely evaded.
- Hardcover
- 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 2008