Collection: History

Women of African descent have contributed to America’s food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype...

Winner of the Man Booker PrizeOne of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Books of the DecadeOne of the Top 10 Books of 2014 – Michiko Kakutani, The New York...

Journalist. Suffragist. Antilynching crusader. In 1862, Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi. In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize.Ida B. Wells...

Essays and interviews explore the work of Carrie Mae Weems and its place in the history of photography, African American art, and contemporary art. In...

The Awakening of Malcolm X is a powerful narrative account of the activist's adolescent years in jail, written by his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz along with 2019...

Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero The essential, “richly researched”* biography of Harriet Tubman, revealing a complex woman who “led a remarkable life, one that her...

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela DavisIn his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one...

The Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop — An NPR Best Book of the Year Can’t Stop Won’t Stop meets Girls to the Front in this essential and...

  The Atlantic staff writer and poet Clint Smith’s revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation “We need this book.” — Ibram X....

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely...

“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and...

This magnificent volume is a celebration of the first 100 years of Black film poster art. A visual feast, these images recount the diverse and...

Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions...

How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming “Water is life” In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in...

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and...

Winner of the MLA's 2016 Alan Bray Prize for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies How BDSM can be used as a metaphor for Black female...

In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites Black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond Black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery...

Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy — During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches...

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana....

When The Souls of Black Folk was first published in 1903, it had a galvanizing effect on the conversation about race in America—and it remains both a...