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The true account of how a young African-American man canoed the length of the Mississippi alone.

First published in 1995, I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Bringing together writings by prominent black thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee made the case for a tradition of ""relational humanism"" distinct from the philosophical preoccupations of the West. Over the past twenty years, however, new scholarly research has un...

By personalizing the experiences of American slaves, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a profound effect on public attitudes toward slavery on the eve of the Civil War, but Stowe’s narrative was not the whole story. Jo-Ann Morgan now reveals how prints and paintings of Uncle Tom and other characters in the novel also shaped public perceptions and how this visual culture had its own impact on history.Through illustrations in various editions of the book, advertisements for stage produ...

In the heat of June in 1943, a wave of destructive and deadly civil unrest took place in the streets of Detroit. The city was under the pressures of both wartime industrial production and the nascent civil rights movement, setting the stage for massive turmoil and racial violence. Thirty-four people were killed, most of whom were Black, and over half of these were killed by police. Two thousand people were arrested, and over seven hundred sustained injuries requiring treatment at local hospitals...

"When Roots Die" celebrates and preserves the venerable Gullah culture of the sea islands of the South Carolina and Georgia coast. Entering into communities long isolated from the world by a blazing sun and salt marshes, Patricia Jones-Jackson captures the cadence of the storyteller lost in the adventures of "Brer Rabbit," records voices lifted in song or prayer, and describes folkways and beliefs that have endured, through ocean voyage and human bondage, for more than two hundred years.

This book offers a revealing look at Rosa Parks, whose role as an activist and struggle with racism began long before her historic 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus ride.Rosa Parks: A Biography captures the story of this remarkable woman like no other biography of her before it. It examines the entire scope of Rosa Parks's life, from her birth in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama to her 1943 enrollment in the Montgomery NAACP to the dramatic events of the 1960s, and her continuing work up to her death in 20...

In a book that fundamentally challenges our understanding of race in the United States, Neil Foley unravels the complex history of ethnicity in the cotton culture of central Texas. This engrossing narrative, spanning the period from the Civil War through the collapse of tenant farming in the early 1940s, bridges the intellectual chasm between African American and Southern history on one hand and Chicano and Southwestern history on the other. "The White Scourge" describes a unique borderlands reg...

Father Paul M. Washington rose to local and nation prominence as an unflagging supporter of civil and women's rights. One of a handful of black priests in a traditionally white church, he fought for understanding among all people, eventually serving twenty-five years as the Rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood. Though his ideas about equality often went against the views of the Episcopal church leadership, he rejected threats of withdrawn fund...

At Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, a Union force composed predominantly of former slaves met their Confederate adversaries in one of the bloodiest small engagements of the war. This important fight received some attention in the North and South but soon drifted into obscurity. In Milliken's Bend, Linda Barnickel uncovers the story of this long-forgotten and highly controversial battle. The fighting at Milliken's Bend occurred in June 1863, about fifteen miles north of Vicksburg on the west bank of...

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction returns with a collection of 14 short stories, rife with characters who will stay with you well beyond the last page Edward P. Jones, the bestselling and prize-winning author of `The Known World', returns to the form that first inspired him - the short story In this collection, Jones returns to the city that inspired his first book, `Lost in the City'. This is the story of Washington DC, a city full of bustling life, bursting forth f...