African American Studies category: 2787 books
AfroAsian Encounters
Culture, History, Politics
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2006
With a Foreword by Vijay Prashad and an Afterword by Gary Okihiro
How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, Paul Robeson's support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian...
Stare in the Darkness
The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2011
Rap’s critique of police brutality in the 1980s. The Hip Hop Political Convention. The rise (and fall) of Kwame Kilpatrick, the “hip-hop mayor” of Detroit. Barack Obama echoing the body language of Jay-Z on the campaign trail. A growing number of black activists and artists claim that rap and hip-hop...
Shades of Freedom
Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process
Language: English
Release Date: June 11, 1998
Few individuals have had as great an impact on the law--both its practice and its history--as A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. A winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, he has distinguished himself over the decades both as a professor at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania,...
by Elizabeth D. Leonard, Ph.D.
Language: English
Release Date: August 23, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: August 23, 2010
The story of the black soldiers who helped save the Union, conquer the West, and build the nation.
In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass promised African Americans that serving in the military offered a sure path to freedom. Once a black man became a soldier, Douglass...
Crafting Lives
African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2013
From the colonial period onward, black artisans in southern cities--thousands of free and enslaved carpenters, coopers, dressmakers, blacksmiths, saddlers, shoemakers, bricklayers, shipwrights, cabinetmakers, tailors, and others--played vital roles in their communities. Yet only a very few black craftspeople...
Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon
The Forgotten History of an American Shrine
Language: English
Release Date: January 20, 2009
New Stories from an Old American Shrine
The home of our first president has come to symbolize the ideals of our nation: freedom for all, national solidarity, and universal democracy. Mount Vernon is a place where the memories of George Washington and the era of America's birth are carefully...
We Were There
Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq
Language: English
Release Date: November 27, 2012
The Greatest Generation meets Bloods in this revealing oral history of the unrecognized contributions of African American veterans.
Award-winning journalist Yvonne Latty never bothered to find out the extent of her father's service until it was almost too late. Inspired by his moving story...
African American Folktales
Stories from Black Traditions in the New World
Language: English
Release Date: July 27, 2011
Full of life, wisdom, and humor, these tales range from the earthy comedy of tricksters to accounts of how the world was created and got to be the way it is to moral fables that tell of encounters between masters and slaves. They include stories set down in nineteenth-century travelers' reports and...
Left of the Color Line
Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2012
This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on the Left in the development of African American,...
Slave Counterpoint
Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2012
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these...
A Fluid Frontier
Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2016
As the major gateway into British North America for travelers on the Underground Railroad, the U.S./Canadian border along the Detroit River was a boundary that determined whether thousands of enslaved people of African descent could reach a place of freedom and opportunity. In A Fluid Frontier: Slavery,...
Terror in the Heart of Freedom
Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2009
The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to...
by Michael L. Ondaatje
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2011
In the last three decades, a brand of black conservatism espoused by a controversial group of African American intellectuals has become a fixture in the nation's political landscape, its proponents having shaped policy debates over some of the most pressing matters that confront contemporary American...
Writing on the Wall
Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Language: English
Release Date: June 29, 2015
"Revolutionary love, revolutionary memory and revolutionary analysis are at work in every page written by Mumia Abu-Jamal
His writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly, urgently. Black man, old-school jazz man, freedom fighter, revolutionary-his...