Black History & Culture: Books and eBooks

This volume investigates black life in turn-of-the-century Chicago, revealing a vibrant community that grew and developed on Chicago's South Side in the early 1900s.

Perhaps no pattern of migration has changed America's socioeconomic structure more than this mass exodus of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, Marcus Garvey sowed the seeds of a new black pride and determination. Attacked by the black intelligentsia and ridiculed by the white press, this Jamaican immigrant astonished all with his black nationalist rhetoric.

Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. This new edition features a foreword by acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad, who notes, "Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the most provocative episodes in African-American and American history."

Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. Evans reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators--despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies--contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States.

Harriet Tubman served as an abolitionist, emancipator of slaves, military spy, and advocate for women's rights. Tubman helped lead more than seventy slaves out of captivity and guide them to freedom along the Underground Railroad. When Civil War broke out, Tubman guided an expedition of Union soldiers on a raid in South Carolina that freed over seven hundred slaves.

In his nearly two terms as president, Barack Obama has solidified his status as something black people haven't had for fifty years: a folk hero.

A study of King's character and persona as captured and reflected in works of African American literature. During the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, King's philosophy of nonviolence was out of step with prevailing notions of militancy (Black Power), and their literature reflected that division. In the quieter times of the 1970s and 1980s and into the twenty-first century, treatments of King and his philosophy in African American literature changed. Writers who initially rejected him and nonviolence became ardent admirers and boosters, particularly in the years following his assassination. By the 1980s, many writers skeptical about King had reevaluated him and began to address him as a fallen hero. To the most recent generation of writers, King is fair game for literary creation, no matter what those portrayals may reveal, to a point where King has become simply another source of reference for creativity. King provides one of the strongest influences upon the creative worlds of multiple generations of African American writers of varying political and social persuasions.

Drawing on quotations from a variety of newspaper and magazine articles, transcripts, speeches, and TV interviews and profiles, the quotations date from Michelle's career as a high-powered corporate lawyer in Chicago and her high-powered executive jobs in the Chicago Mayor's office and at the University of Chicago, up through the election of November 5th, 2008.

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read, a first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South...

Provides identity to those who have been participants in Afro-American diaspora, and examines the issues of urban disintegration and rural poverty. Between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, more than five million African Americans left the fields and farms of the Deep South and headed for the big cities...

A comprehensive written treatment of the African American presence in Hawaii. It appeared as Social Process in Hawaii (Volume 43, 2004). This volume adds topics in new studies on African Americans in Hawaii.

This book chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.

Tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade--abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis.

In this memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey...

Denied the right to fully participate in the U.S. war effort alongside whites at the beginning of World War II, African Americans - spurred on by black newspapers and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP - compelled the prestigious Army Air Corps to open its training programs to black pilots, despite the objections of its top generals.

The true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.  

Constantly rewriting his own story, Malcolm X became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans...

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era.

Here is the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama. Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago's largely segregated South Side.