African American Studies category: 2787 books
Black Mecca
The African Muslims of Harlem
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 2010
The changes to U.S. immigration law that were instituted in 1965 have led to an influx of West African immigrants to New York, creating an enclave Harlem residents now call ''Little Africa.'' These immigrants are immediately recognizable as African in their wide-sleeved robes and tasseled hats, but...
African American Jazz and Rap
Social and Philosophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behavior
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 2015
Music is an expressive voice of a culture, often more so than literature. While jazz and rap are musical genres popular among people of numerous racial and social backgrounds, they are truly important historically for their representation of and impact upon African American culture and traditions....
by Joe Street
Language: English
Release Date: July 21, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: July 21, 2017
"Boldly suggests that cultural organizing shaped the trajectory and spirit of the Civil Rights Movement."--Journal of American Ethnic History "Street brings together many different cultural strands in this work and argues cogently that they were an important part of a movement that...
The Preacher King
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America
Language: English
Release Date: February 6, 1997
Today it seems extraordinary that a nation the size of the United States could have been so profoundly affected by the minister of a little Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. But at a turning point in American history, Martin Luther King, Jr., had an incalculable effect on the fabric of daily...
On the Down Low
A Journey Into the Lives of Straight Black Men Who Sleep With Men
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 2007
A bold exposé of the controversial secret that has potentially dire consequences in many African American communities
Delivering the first frank and thorough investigation of life “on the down low” (the DL), J. L. King exposes a closeted culture of sex between black men who lead “straight”...
Living In, Living Out
African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910-1940
Language: English
Release Date: August 19, 2014
This oral history portrays the lives of African American women who migrated from the rural South to work as domestic servants in Washington, DC in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Living In, Living Out Elizabeth Clark-Lewis narrates the personal experiences of eighty-one women who worked...
Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond
Gwendolyn Bennett’s Selected Writings
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2018
Poet, columnist, artist, and fiction writer Gwendolyn Bennett is considered by many to have been one of the youngest leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and a strong advocate for racial pride and the rights of African American women. Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond presents key selections...
The President's Kitchen Cabinet
The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 2017
An NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Literary Work—Non Fiction
James Beard award–winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First...
Help Me to Find My People
The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers...
Angels of Mercy
White Women and the History of New York's Colored Orphan Asylum
Language: English
Release Date: May 27, 2013
William Seraile uncovers the history of the colored orphan asylum, founded in New York City in 1836 as the nation’s first orphanage for African American children. It is a remarkable institution that is still in the forefront aiding children. Although no longer an orphanage, in its current incarnation...
Negro Comrades of the Crown
African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2012
While it is well known that more Africans fought on behalf of the British than with the successful patriots of the American Revolution, Gerald Horne reveals in his latest work of historical recovery that after 1776, Africans and African-Americans continued to collaborate with Great Britain against...
The Claims of Kinfolk
African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South
Language: English
Release Date: July 21, 2004
In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s. By focusing on relationships among...
Difficult Diasporas
The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2013
Winner of the 2013 Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature
In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the...
The Rise of Gospel Blues
The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church
Language: English
Release Date: June 23, 1994
Most observers believe that gospel music has been sung in African-American churches since their organization in the late 1800s. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as Michael W. Harris's history of gospel blues reveals. Tracing the rise of gospel blues as seen through the career of its founding...