African American Studies category: 2787 books
A Member of the Club
Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World
Language: English
Release Date: March 17, 2009
Informed and driven by his experience as an upper-middle-class African American who lives and works in a predominately white environment, provocative author Lawrence Otis Graham offers a unique perspective on the subject of race. An uncompromising work that will challenge the mindset of every reader,...
The Booker T. Washington Reader
Up From Slavery: An Autobiography; My Larger Education; Character Building; The Negro Problem
Language: English
Release Date: June 10, 2015
Here in one omnibus edition are Booker T. Washington's most important books. Washington was constantly, and often bitterly, criticized by his contemporaries for being too conciliatory to whites and not concerned enough about civil rights. It would not be until after his death that the world would...
Multiply/Divide
On the American Real and Surreal
Language: English
Release Date: August 24, 2015
I have never been particularly interested in slavery, perhaps because it is such an obvious fact of my family's history. The fact that I am descended from slaves is hard to acknowledge on a day-to-day basis, because slavery does not fit with my self-image. Perhaps this is because I am pretty certain...
Freedom’s Gardener
James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2012
In 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave, and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to pass the remainder of his life as a gardener to a wealthy family in the Hudson Valley. Two years after his escape and manumission, he began a diary which he kept until his death....
Sundown Towns
A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2018
Sales of S&S paperback edition: The New Press has taken paperback rights back from S&S, who sold over fifteen thousand copies.
New Preface: Updates the conversation in light of the Trump presidency and the re-remembering of slavery and the civil war that the national reckoning with...
The Hip Hop Wars
What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why It Matters
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2008
How hip hop shapes our conversations about race--and how race influences our consideration of hip hop
Hip hop is a distinctive form of black art in America-from Tupac to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kendrick Lamar, hip hop has long given voice to the African American experience. As scholar and...
Richard Potter
America's First Black Celebrity
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2018
Apart from a handful of exotic--and almost completely unreliable--tales surrounding his life, Richard Potter is almost unknown today. Two hundred years ago, however, he was the most popular entertainer in America--the first showman, in fact, to win truly nationwide fame. Working as a magician and...
It Is Well with My Soul
The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year-Old Woman
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2010
An African American centenarian who saw W. E. B. Du Bois speak in 1924 and attended President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 shares wisdom from a life well lived during a crucial period in American history
Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson was an inspirational, dynamic, and one-of-a-kind woman,...
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2004
Dialect poems by one of the nineteenth century's most talented African American lyricists
Paul Laurence Dunbar was “the most promising young colored man” in nineteenth-century America, according to Frederick Douglass, and subsequently one of the most controversial. His plantation lyrics,...
by Bill Harris
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2012
A poetic reimagining of the life of Booker T. Washington that explores issues of being an African American male of note at the beginning of the twentieth century.
by Cornelius Eady
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2001
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2001
**Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry
Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers, confronting a crucial subject: the black man in America.
“A hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African-American families.”—The Village...
by Maya Angelou
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2010
In 1962 the poet, musician, and performer Maya Angelou claimed another piece of her identity by moving to Ghana, joining a community of "Revolutionist Returnees" inspired by the promise of pan-Africanism. All God's Children Need Walking Shoes is her lyrical and acutely perceptive exploration...
Twisted
My Dreadlock Chronicles
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2015
In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks...
Pride of Family
Four Generations of American Women of Color
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 2007
“From the moment I read the words [my great-grandmother] Frances Anne Rollin wrote in Boston on January 1, 1868—“The year renews its birth today with all its hopes and sorrows”—she became my beacon, the foremother who would finally share with me our collective past . . . —From the Preface
Originally...