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.

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...

Johnson's characters traverse Virginia's landscapes, still stained by some of America's most heinous acts, in pursuit of a place to call home. In each story, she reveals intimate moments within the nation's multitudes, featuring unforgettable characters who struggle beneath burdened inheritances yet manage to persist and love. -- adapted from jacket

Considers the issues of racism, violence, health, children, education, and peace as they affect the lives of women on a global scale.

In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With documentaries like I Am Not Your Negro bringing renewed interest to Baldwin's life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction.
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays...

A narrative history of one of America's deadliest episodes of race riots and lynchings traces how black Americans were brutally targeted by anti-black uprisings that culminated in hundreds of deaths and set the stage for the civil rights movement.

Chronicling the riveting history and personal experiences, at once liberating and challenging, harrowing and inspiring, deeply revealing and profoundly transforming, of African Americans on the road from the advent of the automobile through the seismic changes of the 1960s and beyond, it explores the deep background of a recent phrase rooted in realities that have been an indelible part of the African American experience for hundreds of years.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...