Volume 1 of Nothing but Love in God's Water traced the music of protest spirituals from the Civil War to the American labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and on through the Montgomery bus boycott. This second volume continues the journey, chronicling...

For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world. From Homicide to Slavery, Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections...

An exhaustive and powerful study, it examines the subject from a black perspective, using a topical approach.

The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedomThe era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of...

How race shapes expectations about whose losses matterIn democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up...

In some areas of analysis This Species of Property provides a fuller description of slave life than can be found elsewhere. Its appearance is another welcome indication that the slaves rather than their owners are now holding the center of the...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop, a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to redemption. The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 43-year-old Black man, was...

An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materialsA Penguin Vitae EditionThe preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative powerfully details the life of the...

In 1849, Henry Brown escaped from slavery by shipping himself in a crate from Virginia to an anti-slavery office in Philadelphia. 27 hours and 350 miles later, Brown stepped out of his box to begin a new life. This is his memoir, originally published in...

The companion book to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS series, And Still I Rise—a timeline and chronicle of the past fifty years of black history in the U.S. in more than 350 photos.Beginning with the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, And Still I...

Unknown function: Edited by William H. Freehling

For a century Harlem has been celebrated as the capital of black America, a thriving center of cultural achievement and political action. At a crucial moment in Harlem's history, as gentrification encroaches, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and...

In his boldest and most accessible book to date, Manning Marable lays out a new way to think about the past and the future of race in America. Building upon a unique framework for understanding black history from slavery to Jim Crow to the modern urban...

Why Black dignity is the paradigm of all dignity and Black philosophy is the starting point of all philosophy"A bold attempt to determine the conditions of--and the means for achieving--racial justice."--Kirkus ReviewsThis radical work by one...

From the cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in AmericaFor...

A perceptive and inspiring biography of an extraordinary woman born into slavery who, through grit and determination, became a historic social and educational leader.The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s...

Mahalia Jackson was one of the greatest gospel singers America has ever known, the woman who almost singlehandedly brought black gospel from the churches of Chicago into the public eye. In her pink, floor-length organza gown, her black beehive piled high...

Originating with the birth of the nation itself, in many respects, the story of the domestic slave trade is also the story of the early United States. While an external traffic in slaves had always been present, following the American Revolution this was...

Michael J. Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, is one of the leading authorities on the history of civil rights law in the United States. In Unfinished Business, he illuminates...

Discover the astonishing, inspirational, and largely unknown true story of the eighteen African American athletes who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, defying the racism of both Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South.Set against the turbulent...