African Wars

A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality - in the face of murderous violence - in the years after the Civil War. By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and 13 years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively.

A prizewinning young author tells the moving story of growing up during Burundi’s ethnic civil war in this powerful memoir hailed as “a jewel of a book” (Margaret MacMillan). “There’s nothing like a great love song, and Pacifique Irankunda sings a beautiful one here to his homeland and...

1879 was a year of bloody conflict on the African continent. Cetsywayo, the Zulu chieftain, had wielded his armies with precision and care, defeating and driving his enemies before him. This courageous force finally butted heads with the British on the sweeping plains of Africa, inflicting grievous losses on the empire’s red coats. This book covers the conflict and the major political and military events that took place. Written the year after the war came to an end, the author weaves a compelling narrative that’s hard to put down.

Junior Library Guild Selection * New York Public Library's Best Books for Teens * Goodreads Choice Awards Nonfiction Finalist * Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Books for Teens: Nonfiction * 2018 Texas Topaz Nonfiction List * YALSA's 2018 Quick Picks List * Bank Street's 2018 Best...

In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley - daughter of actress Lena Horne - delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African American family from Civil War to civil rights. Beginning with her great-great-grandfather, Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in postwar Atlanta, Buckley follows her family's two branches: one that stayed in the South and the other that settled in Brooklyn.

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment of the home front. War is often viewed as a crucible that can transform society, but American race relations proved remarkably durable. In Race in the Crucible of War, Gerald F. Goodwin examines how Black servicemen experienced and interpreted racial issues during their time in Vietnam.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'Em and Leave In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the...

Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, who would you want to win? Tens of thousands gave their answer, voting with their feet for Britain and King George. In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia...

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, was about to extend its tendrils northward. Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider its significance and to show how justice cannot be achieved without an honest reckoning.

There have been numerous books about the why, when, and where of slavery in America, but there is a dearth of material exposing what slavery was actually like. In The Great Stain, researcher Noel Rae frames firsthand accounts from former slaves, slave owners, and even African slavers. Rae exposes the commerce and culture of slavery, not only from an economic or moral standpoint but also through multitudinous perspectives within it: a young girl is beaten after being accused of stealing a piece of candy, a slave ship's surgeon recounts brutal treatment and squalid conditions.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution.” Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy, and progressive North with the South, which was stubbornly convinced of the necessity of slavery.

Since the nation’s founding, Black Americans have had a unique perspective on the U.S. experience—a “second sight”—that reveals the truth about the nation to itself. As renowned media scholar Sarah J. Jackson charts in this bold and daring masterwork, at the center of this effort has...

Pulitzer Prize–winning former Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson tells our nation’s torturous racial history through his own family’s story, starting with his great-grandfather’s freedom from slavery and threading his way to his own narrative and reaching today’s Black Lives...

African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.

A long-forgotten Black abolitionist who liberated captive workers by the wagonload, brilliantly satirized slaveholders, and gave the underground railroad its name. Thomas Smallwood was a shoemaker by day and an organizer of mass escapes from slavery by night. Twelve years after purchasing his...

Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid.

By the late 1960s, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in United States history was descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August 1968, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and a new generation of Black GIs had decisively rejected the slights and institutional racism their forefathers had endured.

Dani and Jones have been in love before, but they don’t know it yet. Dani, a music student at Howard University, finds herself tormented nightly by dreams of doomed lovers. While she tries to focus on her future, her life turns upside down when she meets studio guitarist, Jones. Not only does...

During World War II, Port Chicago was a segregated naval munitions base on the outer shores of San Francisco Bay. On July 17, 1944, an explosion rocked the base, killing 320 men — 202 of whom were Black ammunition loaders. In the ensuing weeks, White officers were given leave time and commended for heroic efforts, whereas 328 of the surviving Black enlistees were sent to load ammunition on another ship. When they refused, 50 men were singled out and charged — and convicted — of mutiny. It was the largest mutiny trial in US naval history.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The Nerd Daily, Queerty, She Reads, and more! A cinematic, razor-sharp novel following a backlot fixer’s daring investigation into the suspicious death of a closeted Black actor within the glamorous world of Hollywood “Deliciously witty… There’s...