In this classic work, first published in 1930, James Weldon Johnson, one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, combined the skills of the historian, social scientist, and the reporter to trace the New York black experience from the earliest settlements on Chatham Square during the pre-revolutionary period to the triumphant achievements of Harlem in the 1920s. But Black Manhattan is by no means simply history; It illuminates Johnson and his contributions to both black literature and bl...
The Genesis of Liberation
by Emerson B Powery and Rodney S. Sadler Jr.
Considering that the Bible was used to justify and perpetuate African American enslavement, why would it be given such authority? In this fascinating volume, Powery and Sadler explore how the Bible became a source of liberation for enslaved African Americans by analyzing its function in pre-Civil War freedom narratives. They explain the various ways in which enslaved African Americans interpreted the Bible and used it as...
Between Slavery and Freedom (African American Experience)
by Professor of History Julie Winch
In Between Slavery and Freedom, Julie Winch explores the complex world of those people of African birth or descent who occupied the "borderlands" between slavery and freedom in the 350 years from the founding of the first European colonies in what is today the United States to the start of the Civil War. However they had navigated their way out of bondage - through flight, through military service, through self-purchase, through the working of the law in different times and in different places,...
A Matter of Moral Justice (Working Class in American History)
by Jenny Carson
A long-overlooked group of workers and their battle for rights and dignity Like thousands of African American women, Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson worked in New York’s power laundry industry in the 1930s. Jenny Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove them to help unionize the city’s laundry workers. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry, and their numbers allowed women like Adelm...
The Philadelphia Negro (Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois) (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies (Hardcover), #14)
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Across all the boroughs, The Long Crisis shows, New Yorkers helped transform their broke and troubled city in the 1970s by taking the responsibilities of city governance into the private sector and market, steering the process of neoliberalism. Newspaper headlines beginning in the mid-1960s blared that New York City, known as the greatest city in the world, was in trouble. They depicted a metropolis overcome by poverty and crime, substandard schools, unmanageable bureaucracy, ballooning budg...
A 2013 CASEY Award Finalist for Best Baseball Book of the Year and a Booklist Top Ten Sports Book of the Year When baseball swept America in the years after the Civil War, independent, semipro, and municipal leagues sprouted up everywhere. With civic pride on the line, rivalries were fierce and teams often signed ringers to play alongside the town dentist, insurance salesman, and teen prodigy. In drought-stricken Bismarck, North Dakota during the Great Depression, one of the most improbable tea...
The rise of black radicalism in the 1960s was a result of both the successes and the failures of the civil rights movement. The movement's victories were inspirational, but its failures to bring about structural political and economic change pushed many to look elsewhere for new strategies. During this era of intellectual ferment, the writers, editors, and activists behind the monthly magazine Liberator (1960-71) were essential contributors to the debate. In the first full-length history of the...
Strength for the Fight (Library of Religious Biography (Lrb))
by Gary Scott Smith
For decades, Marietta High was the flagship public school of a largely white suburban community in Cobb County, Georgia, just northwest of Atlanta. Today, as the school's majority black and Latino students struggle with high rates of poverty and low rates of graduation, Marietta High has become a symbol of the wave of resegregation that is sweeping white students and students of color into separate schools across the American South. Students of the Dream begins with the first generations of Ma...
A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this colle...
These ordinary women lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. With the help of local pastors, Steele recorded these living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman--child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi--a Jewel of the Delta. From the stand Mrs. Tennie Self took for her marriage to be acknowledged in the phone book, to th...
An exploration of the life and legacy of Prince discusses his vibrant and prolific output, the paradigm-shifting ideas in his music, and his wide-ranging impact on modern culture.
A vivid history of life in Princeton, New Jersey, told through the voices of its African American residents I Hear My People Singing shines a light on a small but historic black neighborhood at the heart of one of the most elite and world-renowned Ivy-League towns--Princeton, New Jersey. The vivid first-person accounts of more than fifty black residents detail aspects of their lives throughout the twentieth century. Their stories show that the roots of Princeton's African American community are...
Army Life in a Black Regiment (Civil War) (Collector's Library of the Civil War)
by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
In 1862 military necessity enabled Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to pry from a hesitant President Lincoln the authority to enlist black troops in the Union army. The pioneer regiment of ex-slaves was to secure the beachhead tenously held at Beaufort, off the South Carolina coast. Within a year, Lincoln was to hail the enlistment of black soldiers, which he had earlier resisted as "revolutionary," as the "heaviest blow yet dealt the rebellion." The abolition of slavery, unthinkable in 1861, w...