Showing titles in Black & African American

Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad. As Jim Crow laws became more prevalent and forced Black Americans to "ride Jim Crow" on the rails, the train compartment became a contested space of leisure and work.

Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. 

America was founded on the concept of the innate and inalienable rights of humankind. Many Christians see an echo of the imago Dei—that every human being carries the image of God—within those ideals. Yet these rights were systemically withheld from the Black and enslaved residents of this country for centuries. Through it all, Black people have proclaimed the truth of their dignity and personhood in powerful and profound ways. Crowned with Glory collects many of the writings of these men and women, both familiar and lesser-known, to shine a light on what has always been there.

American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. The multitude of events and mixed-race individuals included in the book underscores that black and white Americans share the same history, and in many cases, the same ancestry. American Founders is meant to celebrate this shared heritage and strengthen these bonds.

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area's indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region's economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Ross Hardesty focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life.

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt. Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners.

African Americans have had every reason to doubt America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition, which is urgently needed today.

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia Garcia Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities.

No segundo volume de Escravidão—Da corrida do ouro em Minas Gerais até a chegada da corte de dom João ao Brasil, Laurentino Gomes concentra-se no século XVIII. O período representou o auge do tráfico negreiro no Atlântico, motivado pela descoberta das minas de ouro e diamantes no país e pela disseminação, em outras regiões da América, do cultivo de cana-de-açúcar, arroz, tabaco, algodão e outras lavouras marcadas pelo uso intensivo de mão de obra cativa.

O último audiolivro da trilogia Escravidão é dedicado ao século XIX, à Independência, ao Primeiro e ao Segundo Reinados, ao movimento abolicionista, que resultou na Lei Áurea de 13 de maio de 1888, e ao legado da escravidão, que ainda hoje emperra a caminhada dos brasileiros em direção ao futuro. A escravidão era, na definição de José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, o Patriarca da Independência, um cancro que contaminava e roía as entranhadas da sociedade brasileira. Disseminado por todo o território, o escravismo perpassava todas as atividades e todas as classes sociais.

When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and political thought. To Build a Black Future examines the spirit and significance of this insurgency, offering a revelatory account of a new political culture—responsive to pain, suffused with joy, and premised on care—emergent from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition that traces back to the Black slave.

Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, The Love Jones Cohort centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts.

The more you understand someone's history, the better you can see their humanity. This is true for individuals as well as for society at large. Race relations have suffered because of the erasure of important Black history and cultural context. As we fill in the gaps of our collective knowledge, communities can grow in understanding, empathy, and solidarity. Terence Lester shares the buried history of the struggles Black people have faced against unjust systems.

From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924-2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County's NAACP. Known as the "Lady of Hats," coined by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, Pigee was a businesswoman, mother, and leader. Her book, The Struggle of Struggles, offers a detailed view of the daily grind of organizing for years to open the state's closed society.

The American workplace exhibits a growing imbalance when it comes to human identity. Leaders are frequently defined in the absence of their critical social identifiers, but the exclusion of these identifiers is a mistake and ignores essential physical, cultural, and spiritual realities. Rather than abandoning an individual's social identities, the ones we choose and the ones we do not, Leading While Black draws on the lived experiences of executive-level leaders of the Christian faith and Black identity, and offers a testament to the power of a living God in the social fabric of public life.

Hip Hop Womanist writer and theologian EbonyJanice’s book of essays center a fourth wave of Womanism, dreaming, the pursuit of softness, ancestral reverence, and radical wholeness as tools of liberation. All The Black Girls Are Activists is a love letter to Black girls and Black women, asking and attempting to offer some answers to “Who would black women get to be if we did not have to create from a place of resistance?” by naming Black women’s wellness, wholeness, and survival as the radical revolution we have been waiting for.

In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was universal.

One of conservatism's most articulate voices dissects today's most important economic, racial, political, education, legal, and social issues, sharing his entertaining and thought-provoking insights on a wide range of contentious subjects.

Between World War II and 1980, tens of thousands of Black people moved to Boston from the South as part of the Great Migration, one of the most consequential mass movements of people in American history. Black migration from the South transformed the city, as it did urban areas across the country. North to Boston is the first book to examine that important subject. Blake Gumprecht traces the history of this migration and explores its impacts in greater depth through the lives of ten individuals, each the subject of one chapter.

"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here," declared Martin Luther King, Jr. He had come to that city of racist terror convinced that massive protest could topple Jim Crow. But the insurgency faltered. To revive it, King made a sacrificial act on Good Friday, April 12, 1963: he was arrested. Alone in his cell, reading a newspaper, he found a statement from eight "moderate" clergymen who branded the protests extremist and "untimely." King drafted a furious rebuttal that emerged as the "Letter from Birmingham Jail".