African Politics

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.

According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore Bell Hooks's electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As Hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a "powerful site for intervention, challenge and change." And intervene, challenge, and change is what hooks does best.

In Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis sums up a lifetime of insight. He looks at slavery in the American South; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of slaves; the destructive internal long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism.

Beginning with his final departure from Neverland, Untouchable takes listeners through Jackson's final four years, as he shuttled from California to the Middle East, Ireland, Asia, the East Coast, and Las Vegas, planning to recapture his wealth and reputation with a comeback album and a series of 50 mega-concerts, for which he was rehearsing until the day before his death. Sullivan has never-before-reported information about Jackson's business dealings and the pedophilia allegations that irreparably marked his reputation, and he had exclusive access to inner-circle figures.

In this atmospheric novel set in the Jim Crow South, a powerful Black family fights to protect their empire—an "unforgettable must-read" for readers of Tayari Jones (Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling author). Jordan Sable, a prosperous undertaker turned political boss...

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between Black youth culture and the mass media.

Award-winning civil rights historian Ray Arsenault describes the dramatic story behind Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial - an early milestone in civil rights history - on the 70th anniversary of her performance. On Easter Sunday 1939, the brilliant vocalist Marian Anderson sang before a throng of 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington - an electrifying moment and an underappreciated milestone in civil rights history.

More than 50 years ago, John Coltrane drew the 12 musical notes in a circle and connected them with straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane had put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander returns the favor, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe.

An essential guide to lifelong health and greater well-being from one of today’s highly regarded women’s health experts.

In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship—in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film—and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert."

In The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, veteran baseball writer Bruce Markusen tells the story of one of the most likable and significant teams in the history of professional sports. In addition to the fact that they fielded the first all-minority lineup in major league history, the 1971 Pirates are noteworthy for the team's inspiring individual performances.

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

The story of black professional baseball provides a remarkable perspective on several major themes in modern African American history: the initial black response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration. Baseball functioned as a critical component in the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the North and South. While most black businesses struggled to survive from year to year, professional baseball teams and leagues operated for decades, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building.

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the Black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries? In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding Black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of Blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer Black college graduates than would otherwise exist.

In a deeply personal follow-up to his #1 bestseller This is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends about Racism, a modern media iconoclast faces a test of faith—and reveals how such tribulations can make us stronger, as individuals and as a nation. Renowned journalist Don Lemon always had a...

In the vibrant tapestry of humanity, "Nature Knows No Color-Line" unravels the threads of shared ancestry across continents and time. This groundbreaking work challenges rigid racial lines, exposing the myths of purity and celebrating the interconnectedness of our roots. Prepare to embark on a captivating journey through history, anthropology, and genetics, where evidence whispers a powerful truth: skin may differ, but beneath it all, we bloom from the same soil.

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history - a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the century since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside from juvenile biographies. The truth about Harriet Tubman has become lost inside a legend woven of racial and gender stereotypes.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! A growing number of Americans want to tear down what it’s taken us 250 years to build—and they’ll start by canceling our shared history, ideals, and culture. Traditional areas of civic agreement are vanishing. We can’t agree on what makes America special. We...

Through a series of essays, Du Bois explores the psychological impact of racism, the struggle for equality, and the concept of "double consciousness"—the tension of being Black in a society that marginalises you. A seminal work in American history and literature, this book challenges the notion of a "post-racial" world, urging readers to confront the deep-rooted injustices that continue to shape the lives of Black Americans.

From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says former New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, Black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built. Provocative and controversial, Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of Black athletes in the United States.