Trade Books for Courses :: Trade Books For Courses: African American Studies African American Studies Books

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It's Bigger Than Hip Hop

The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation

M. K. Asante, Jr. St. Martin's Press

"An empowering book that moves you to action and to question status quo America. Reading It's Bigger Than Hip Hop is motoring through a new generation of America with one of its best storytellers."—Ari Bloomekatz, Los Angeles Times

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To Tell the Truth Freely

The Life of Ida B. Wells

Mia Bay Hill and Wang

“In this remarkable book, Mia Bay understands Ida B. Wells in full—as thinker, writer, crusader, politician, and woman of the world. Finally, we have a biography worthy of one of the bravest and most influential activists in U.S. history.”—Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

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The Soldier's Pen

Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War

Robert E. Bonner; Foreword by James G. Basker Hill and Wang

"For anyone interested in viewing America's traumatic Civil War from the perspective of ordinary individuals who found themselves in the Union and Confederate armies, Robert E. Bonner's The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War will be a very rewarding experience. This expertly edited collection of letters and drawings mailed to the families and friends of sixteen 'typical' but quite diverse citizen-soldiers conveys a deeply human dimension to America's most dehumanizing war."—David Brion Davis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

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Arc of Justice

A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

Kevin Boyle Holt Paperbacks

Winner of the National Book Award

"Masterful . . . An important, scholarly work . . . The writing is graceful [and] it endows the story with the majesty and consequence of an epic . . . This is the kind of book that causes students to major in history."—Paul Butler, The Boston Globe

Awards

National Book Awards - Winner - Nonfiction
National Books Critics Circle Awards - Nominee - Nonfiction
Society of Midland Authors Book Awards - Winner - Adult Nonfiction
Michigan Notable Books - Winner - Notable Book

Bonus

Awards

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Conception

A Novel

Kalisha Buckhanon St. Martin's Griffin

"Conception is Buckhanon's second novel, a work of urban fiction that mixes the usual streetwise tales of woe with casual references to Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and the occasional bit of French . . . The heroine is 15-year-old Shivana, who lives in a Chicago slum and believes that most black women stumble blindly into the same painful trap: meet some man, believe his sweet talk, bear his offspring, then watch him leave . . . Shivana's own mother has followed this scenario, ending up bitter and alone . . . Shivana, seeking love in all the wrong places, finds herself pregnant by the first older man who smiles her way. The question of the novel thus becomes whether she will decide to terminate the pregnancy or to keep the unborn child . . . [Conception is] the work of a gifted young novelist."—Kim McLarin, The Washington Post

Trade Paperback : $14.95 Buy	The Wanderer The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set Its Sails Erik Calonius St. Martin's Griffin "A compelling and heartrending record of a journey that helped push the nation to the brink of the Civil War."—*The Washington Times*

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Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon

The Forgotten History of an American Shrine

Scott E. Casper Hill and Wang

“Mount Vernon boasts stories that number in the hundreds, but one of its most dramatic tales has been left untold until now. In Scott Casper’s compelling narrative we see sectional crisis, Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction through the eyes of Sarah Johnson and the hundreds of other African Americans who lived and labored at the fabled shrine. The Mount Vernon that belonged to them as much as to Washington and his heirs now testifies to the signal importance of our nation’s African American past.”—Mary Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan, and author of Learning to Stand and Speak

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And It Don't Stop

The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years

Edited by Raquel Cepeda; Foreword by Nelson George Faber and Faber, Inc.

"An irresistible compilation of the most stylish prose and revelatory interviews of the last twenty-five years on hip-hop, And It Don't Stop is required reading for any serious devotee of contemporary urban culture . . . A glorious reminder of how influential journalists have been, and continue to be, in helping to shape and create this [music]."—Jason King, New York University

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Can't Stop Won't Stop

A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

Jeff Chang; Introduction by DJ Kool Herc Picador

"The birth of hip-hop out of the ruin of the South Bronx is a story that has been told many times, but never with the cinematic scope and the analytic force that Chang brings to it. Robert Moses unleashes the destructive juggernaut of the Cross-Bronx Expressway; landlords set fire to worthless tenements; police stand by and do nothing; and, against a backdrop of gang warfare, peacemaking d.j.s lay down the heavy beats and spidery loops around which a rapping, dancing, graffiti-painting culture grows. This is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written. Chang is blind to no one's greed or viciousness, but he retains an idealistic view of a music that speaks the truth about the alternately stultifying and horrifying urban landscapes that the parents who hate hip-hop have made."—The New Yorker

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How Race Is Lived in America

Pulling Together, Pulling Apart

Correspondents of The New York Times, Introduction by Joseph Lelyveld Times Books

"This is reporting at its best. This is how sociology should be, a comprehensive view in depth on a major social problem in America. This will be a benchmark for all future inquiries."—Daniel Bell, professor emeritus, Harvard University

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A Princess Found

An American Family, an African Chiefdom, and the Daughter Who Connected Them All

Sarah Culberson and Tracy Trivas St. Martin's Press

"A mannered account of a biracial woman raised by a white family in West Virginia who was reunited joyfully with her African family . . . The juxtaposition of the two narratives is deliberately jarring. While Culberson was being crowned Homecoming Queen, her family and other Mende people faced ambush, amputations—a favorite terror tactic of the rebels—and homelessness. As a girl growing up, Culberson was accused by other blacks of not being 'black enough' . . . Culberson's wrenching coming-of-age tale ably chronicles her love and acceptance by both of her families . . . Inspiring."—Kirkus Reviews

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Trade Paperback : $15.00 Buy	Wounded A Novel Percival Everett Graywolf Press Paper "Starts rhapsodically and rewards the reader with so many moments of love and laughter—Wounded is full of shocks and surprises."—*Los Angeles Times*

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The Race Card

How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse

Richard Thompson Ford Picador

"Mr. Ford, a clear and lively writer, probes and prods and provokes as he steers his way through this contested terrain. He takes dead aim at racial opportunists, opponents of affirmative action, multiculturalists and the myriad rights organizations trying to hitch a ride on the successes of the black civil rights movement. All, in different ways, he argues, are playing the race card. All are harming the cause of civil rights."—William Grimes, The New York Times

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Audio

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Mirror to America

The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

"John Hope Franklin comes across on these pages as the rarest sort of patriotic American—one who believes this nation should actually live up to its lofty ideals of justice and equality for all . . . An important eyewitness account by a humble scholar confronting racism in his life and that of his country."—Chuck Leddy, San Francisco Chronicle

More Formats: Audio

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Awards

Robert F. Kennedy Book Award - Winner - Grand Prize

Bonus

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I've Got a Home in Glory Land

A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad

Karolyn Smardz Frost Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

"Karolyn Smardz Frost's superb research has produced a wonderful account of the underground railroad, elevating Thornton and Lucy Blackburn to their rightful place in the dramatic story of pre-Civil War slave resistance, abolition, and African American life on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. This finely detailed account depicts a truly international antislavery movement."—James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, coauthors of Slavery and the Making of America and Hard Road to Freedom

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Lose Your Mother

A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Saidiya Hartman Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present and a welcome illustration of the powers of innovative scholarship to help us better understand how history shapes identity. But the book is also—this must be stressed—splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. She combines a novelist's eye for telling detail with the blunt, self-aware voice of those young writers who have revived the American coming-of-age story into something more engaging and empathetic than the tales of redemption or of the exemplary life well lived, patterned on Henry Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass."—Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review

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Malcolm X

A Graphic Biography

Written by Andrew Helfer; Art by Randy DuBurke Hill and Wang

"Helfer and DuBurke convey the life of Malcolm X in a dignified, enlightening and entertaining manner . . . Educators seeking vibrant material, as well as young Americans besotted with contemporary pop culture should snatch up copies of this brilliant volume."—Miami Herald

Teachers Guide

Awards

YALSA Best Book for Young Adults - Nonfiction

Bonus

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Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour

A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Peniel E. Joseph Holt Paperbacks

"From Malcolm X's Harlem, through Stokely Carmichael's Mississippi, to the San Francisco of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour is a mesmerizing journey through the radical wing of America's civil rights revolution. In vivid, moving prose Peniel Joseph re-creates the fierce passion and prophetic anger that made Black Power one of the nation's most explosive political movements."—Kevin Boyle, Professor of History, Ohio State University, and author of the National Book Award-Winning Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

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American Slavery

1619-1877

Peter Kolchin; 10th-Anniversary Edition; With a New Preface and Afterword Hill and Wang

"American Slavery achieves the nearly impossible—synthesizing the voluminous, contentious, and often conflicting scholarship about slavery in the United States from its inception in the seventeenth century to its demise two and a half centuries later . . . An unsurpassed survey of slavery for our times."—Michael P. Johnson, The Journal of Southern History

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The Day Freedom Died

The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

Charles Lane Holt Paperbacks

"A former Supreme Court reporter for The Washington Post, [Lane] is perfectly comfortable with the play of politics and the intricacies of the law. So while he builds an absorbing narrative of events in Colfax—his chapter on the massacre itself is riveting—he's careful to frame them within the political wars then raging in New Orleans and Washington . . . he manages to turn the case, United States v. Cruikshank, into a legal thriller, complete with crusading lawyers, courtroom confrontations and soaring declarations of principle . . . Colfax's whites dedicated the monument to their dead on a drab day in the spring of 1921. By then white supremacy was so firmly entrenched it had become a point of pride, something to celebrate in stone. And the town's whites undoubtedly thought it just as well not to mention the bones buried in unmarked graves around the Colfax courthouse. The time for silence has long since passed. Colfax will probably never build an obelisk to honor the massacre's victims. But with his gripping book, Charles Lane has given them a memorial every bit as imposing."—Kevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review

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Redemption

The Last Battle of the Civil War

Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

"Written on a dramatic human sale, and leavened by some fresh research and analysis, it is an arresting piece of popular history . . . It offers a vigorous, necessary reminder of how racist reaction bred an American terrorism that suppressed black political activity and crushed Reconstruction in the South. And it illuminates the often bloody fights over black voting rights that would recur for a century to come—and remain, even today, a source of partisan strife, albeit without paramilitary gunfire and with the party labels reversed."—Sean Wilentz, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

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W.E.B. Du Bois

A Biography

David Levering Lewis A John Macrae/Holt Paperbacks Book

David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out of his superlative two-volume biography of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America, who set the standard for historical scholarship on this era.

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Awards

National Book Awards - Finalist
National Book Awards - Finalist
Pulitzer Prize - Winner
Pulitzer Prize - Winner

Bonus

Awards

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First Class Citizenship

The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson

Michael G. Long, editor Holt Paperbacks

"First Class Citizenship is a rich and impressive reminder of how a courageous, pioneering athlete can also become an insistent and independent-minded political activist on behalf of human rights for all."—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

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The Soiling of Old Glory

The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America

Louis P. Masur Bloomsbury Press

"Masur's skill at teasing the symbolic resonance from the photo's structure and composition is impressive, as is his treatment of the flag as national icon. He displays his real skill as a historian, however, in his remarkably clear and fair-minded synopses of tangled racial histories . . . His sketch of precisely how the Boston school crisis develops is a small model of detailed economy and essential context."—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times