In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...

Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

This is the first book to define and explore Black fatigue, the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people - and explain why and how society needs to collectively do more to combat its pernicious effects.

"'We were eight years in power' was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates...

"Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism? In this thought-provoking study, Carolyn Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans. Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and...

From the award-winning author of All Her Little Secrets comes yet another gripping, suspenseful novel, in which, after the murder of a white man in Jim Crow Mississippi, two black sisters run away to different parts of the country...but can they escape the secrets they left behind? It's the summer of 1964, and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-one-year-old...

"The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology. He argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies....

"At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces...

In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, "black rage," and "white guilt" in our status-minded world. In "These Radical Chic Evenings," Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene and its astonishing repercussions with...

""Racism is an existential threat to America," Theodore R. Johnson declares at the start of his profound and exhilarating book, a refutation of the American Promise enshrined in our Constitution--that all men and women are inherently equal. And yet racism continues to corrode our society. If we cannot overcome it, Johnson argues, while the United States will remain a geopolitical entity, the promise that made America unique on earth will have died....