"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a stunning meditation on ritual and collectiveness that explores how older forms of inquiry-from song to prayer to ways of public gathering-might help us all survive violent times and address America's shared history"-- Smith begins in Sunflower, Alabama, where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero's record but difficult prospects as a Black man. She consider the life of her father through the...

The story of a three day pass: An African-American soldier stationed in France is granted a promotion and a three-day leave from base and heads to Paris, where he finds whirlwind romance with a white woman--but what happens to their love when his furlough is over? Watermelon man: A loud-mouthed, bigoted white man's suburban existence is jarringly upended when he wakes to discover that he has become a black man. Sweet Sweetback's baadasssss song:...

"Limited Choices tells about the life of Mable Jones, an African American domestic worker from Charlottesville employed in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. The authors, whose family employed Jones, use an oral interview and their own childhood memories as a starting point in piecing together Jones's life in an effort to investigate the impact of structural racism, and a discriminatory system their family helped uphold. The book treats three different...

"This book traces the curious history of the Cornerstone Speech. Alexander H. Stephens's defense of the new Confederacy, delivered on March 21, 1861, the Cornerstone Speech was an uninhibited overture to a new nation founded on white supremacy and slavery, and an instant sensation. While the speech is widely cited, no full-length treatment of the work and its legacy exists - and it is poorly understood. Hébert examines how Stephens initially considered...

"For decades, scholars have used the coastal city of New Orleans as a remarkable outlier, an exception to nearly every 'rule' of accepted U.S. historiography. American only by adoption, New Orleans, in the vast majority of studies, serves as a frontier town of the circum-Caribbean, a vestige of North America's European colonial era along the southern coast of a foreign, northern, insular United States. Perhaps more than any other topic, then, race...

Using the Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville Public Libraries as case studies, The Development of Southern Public Libraries and the African American Quest for Library Access, 1898-1963 argues that public libraries played an integral role in Southern cities' economic and cultural boosterism efforts during the New South and Progressive Eras. First, Southern public libraries helped institutionalize segregation during the early twentieth century by refusing...

"A searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans. America's backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington's cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln's log cabin. It is the fantastic tale of slaves that spontaneously teleported...

"In a bold departure from previous scholarship, Le'Trice D. Donaldson locates the often overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers' involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing...

With Be A Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--and How You Can, Too, Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems -- like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more -- she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various...