Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later.Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one...

At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here: criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a...

A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century. In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly...

Wilson Moses bases this collection of essays on the thought of five major African-American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus J. Garvey. Highlighting the intellectual struggles and...

Commonly portrayed in the media as holding women in strict subordination and deference to men, Islam is nonetheless attracting numerous converts among African American women. Are these women "reproducing their oppression," as it might seem? Or does their...

From the late feminist icon and New York Times bestselling author of All About Love, an in-depth look at one of the most critical issues facing Black Americans: a collective wounded self-esteem that has prevailed from slavery to the present day, with a...

The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time.This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period...

In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In...

Describes the experiences of former slaves in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee during the Reconstruction years in an effort to understand the reasons for the mass migration of freedpeople to Kansas in 1879.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Power movement provided the dominant ideological framework through which many young, poor, and middle-class blacks made sense of their lives and articulated a political vision for their futures. The legacy...

This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an "invisible" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering.Set in Memphis, home of...

Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought revisits the activism and arguments in support of separate black statehood from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, detailing the ways black nationalism historically mirrors broader currents in US...

Throughout African-American history, religion has been indelibly intertwined with the fight against intolerance and racial prejudice. Martin Luther King, Jr.-America's best-known champion of civil liberties-was a Baptist minister. Father Divine, a fiery...

Critical writings by the "father of Harlem radicalism".The brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and activist Hubert Harrison (1883 - 1927) is one of the truly important, yet neglected, figures of early twentieth-century America. Known as "the...

One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in AmericaA haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published...

"A superb oral history." —The Washington Post Book World"So touching, so exhilarating...no book for a long time has left me so moved or so happy." —The New York Times Book ReviewThe almost unfathomable courage and the undying faith that propelled the...

No other story in the Bible has fired the imaginations of African Americans quite like that of Exodus. Its tale of suffering and the journey to redemption offered hope and a sense of possibility to people facing seemingly insurmountable evil. Exodus!...

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few...

Now a TV series on FOX starring Morris Chestnut, Yaya DaCosta, Nadine Ellis, and Joe Morton."Fascinating. . . . [Graham] has made a major contribution both to African-American studies and the larger American picture." —New York TimesDebutante cotillions...