"In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men -- bodies exploited through slavery and segregation,...

Examines the role of African-Americans in the military through the history of the Triple Nickles, America's first black paratroopers, who fought against attacks perpetrated on the American West by the Japanese during World War II.

The incredible life story of Eugene Bullard, the first African American military pilot in WWI, who went on to become a self-taught jazz musician, a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer. Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility...

"Activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation"--Front flap.

A reflection on the psyche of young Black America, turning a mother's eye to her sons' generation. Observes the lives and attitudes of young people who even as children could never be shielded from the brutality that has ended so many Black boys and men's lives. Taking the reader through our past and extrapolating its lasting impact through to our current moment, Elizabeth then turns her eye to the radical potential of our future with an awareness...

Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer in 2004. She soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Kuo uses quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students...

This is the story of a man who searched his conscience, decided that the American Dream should be colorblind, and then set out to change the rules. Part memoir, part history lesson, and part road map, Creating Equal tells how a black man fought against affirmative action in California and Washington, D.C. It begins in segregated Louisiana with a hard-working, resilient family that refused to be destroyed by personal tragedy or to be defined by race....

Bruce Nelson is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His first book, Workers on the Waterfront, was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize by the Organization of American Historians. His next book will be an exploration of the process of "becoming Irish" in the Irish diaspora, with a particular focus on the ports of New York and Liverpool. Divided We Stand is a study of how class and race have intersected in American society--above all,...

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology...

In the story of Baldwin's crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. An exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and an interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.