African American Studies category: 2787 books
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning
Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2012
Cedric J. Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations...
by Anita Reynolds
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2014
This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating African American woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place in the most interesting times. Actress, dancer, model, literary critic, psychologist, and free-spirited provocateur, Anita Reynolds was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an American Cocktail.
Osage and Settler
Reconstructing Shared History through an Oklahoma Family Archive
Language: English
Release Date: June 8, 2015
Drawing on a rare family archive and archival material from the Osage Nation, this book documents a unique relationship among white settlers, the Osage and African Americans in Oklahoma. The history of white settlement and colonization is often discussed in the context of the cultural erasure of,...
Voices from Slavery
100 Authentic Slave Narratives
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2012
In the late 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration embarked upon a project to interview 100 former American slaves. The result of that unique undertaking is this collection of authentic firsthand accounts documenting the lives of men and women once held in bondage...
American Nightmare
The History of Jim Crow
Language: English
Release Date: July 21, 2003
For a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, a quarter of all Americans lived under a system of legalized segregation called Jim Crow. Together with its rigidly enforced canon of racial "etiquette," these rules governed nearly every aspect of life--and outlined draconian punishments...
Neither Fugitive nor Free
Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2009
Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets,...
by Frederick Douglass
Language: English
Release Date: January 28, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: January 28, 2014
An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials
The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape...
by Nathan Irvin Huggins
Language: English
Release Date: January 5, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: January 5, 2011
This classic work of scholarship and empathy tells the story of the self-creation of the African-American people. It assesses the full impact of the Middle Passage -- "the most traumatizing mass human migration in modern history" -- and of North American slavery both on the enslaved and...
American Slaves Tell Their Stories
Six Interviews
Language: English
Release Date: August 13, 2012
Vivid narratives recall life during and just after the Civil War, not only describing cruel punishments, divided families, and debilitating labor, but also providing information about religious beliefs and practices, as well as the condition and progress of former slaves. Essential reading for students of African-American studies.
American Slavery As It Is
Selections from the Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses
Language: English
Release Date: October 26, 2017
The stories of hundreds of African-Americans who lived in bondage are preserved in this powerful 1839 chronicle. Compiled by a prominent abolitionist, the accounts include personal narratives from freed slaves as well as testimonials from active and former slave owners, presenting a condemnation of...
The Properties of Violence
Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2012
The Properties of Violence focuses on two connected issues: representations of lynching in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American photographs, poetry, and fiction; and the effects of those representations. Alexandre compellingly shows how putting representations of lynching in dialogue with...
The Common Cause
Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2016
When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that...
The Roughest Riders
The Untold Story of the Black Soldiers in the Spanish-American War
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2015
The inspiring story of the first African American soldiers to serve during the postslavery era
Many have heard how Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. But often forgotten in the great swamp of history is that Roosevelt’s success was...
Mama Africa
Reinventing Blackness in Bahia
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2010
Often called the “most African” part of Brazil, the northeastern state of Bahia has the country’s largest Afro-descendant population and a black culture renowned for its vibrancy. In Mama Africa, Patricia de Santana Pinho examines the meanings of Africa in Bahian constructions of blackness....