Trade Books for Courses :: Trade Books For Courses: History United States: African American History Books

Trade Paperback : $17.99 Buy	American Nightmare The History of Jim Crow Jerrold M. Packard St. Martin's Griffin For a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, a quarter of all Americans lived under a system of legalized segregation called Jim Crow. Together with...

Trade Paperback :
$16.00 Buy

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

Trade Paperback :
$17.00 Buy

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

Excerpt: Read

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

Trade Paperback : $17.00 Buy	The Big Sea An Autobiography Langston Hughes; Introduction by Arnold Rampersad Hill and Wang Introduction by Arnold Rampersad. Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two...

Trade Paperback : $18.99 Buy	The Burning Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 Tim Madigan St. Martin's Griffin/Thomas Dunne Books "A powerful book, a harrowing case study made all the more so by Madigan's skillful, clear-eyed telling of it."—Adam Nossiter, The New York Times Book Review

Trade Paperback :
$18.00 Buy

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

Trade Paperback :
$17.00 Buy

Children of Fire

A History of African Americans

Thomas C. Holt Hill and Wang

“A brilliant, sweeping portrait of Afro-American history that transports the reader from the first arrival of slaves in Virginia in 1619 to the election of President Barack Obama. Like Alex Haley’s Roots, this historic publication vividly reminds us of the long, painful experience of violence that African-Americans have endured and survived. Thomas C. Holt’s Children of Fire is a monumental work that should be required reading for every American.”—William Ferris, Professor of History, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

Excerpt: Read

Hardcover :
$35.00 Buy

The Clamorgans

One Family’s History of Race in America

Julie Winch Hill and Wang

The historian Julie Winch uses her sweeping, multigenerational history of the unforgettable Clamorgans to chronicle how one family navigated race in America...

Excerpt: Read

Trade Paperback :
$17.00 Buy

Coltrane

The Story of a Sound

Ben Ratliff Picador

“Ratliff suggests, intelligently and persuasively, that Coltrane had, among other attributes, a 'mystic's sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture.' Ratliff patiently explicates Coltrane's legend, writing in short, aphoristic bursts, often as elliptically as his subject played tenor saxophone, but never less than lucidly.”—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review

Trade Paperback : $14.95 Buy	Dark Bargain Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution Lawrence Goldstone Walker & Company Lawrence Goldstone throws new light on the framing of the U. S. Constitution in this intriguing chronicle of the Constitutional debates, bringing to life the...

Trade Paperback : $9.95 Buy	David Walker's Appeal David Walker; New Introduction by Sean Wilentz Hill and Wang David Walker's Appeal is a landmark work of American history and letters, the most radical piece of writing by an African American in the nineteenth century....

Trade Paperback :
$17.99 Buy

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

Excerpt: Read

Trade Paperback : $16.95 Buy	The Devil's Own Work The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America Schecter, Barnet Walker & Company On July 13, 1863, the largest riots in American history broke out on the streets of New York City, nearly destroying in four days the financial, industrial,...

Trade Paperback : $15.00 Buy	The Evidence of Things Not Seen Reissued Edition James Baldwin; Foreword by Derrick Bell with Janey Dewary Bell Holt Paperbacks This edition of a classic work by one of America’s premier writers offers a new Foreword by Derrick Bell (with Janet Dewart Bell) to the 1995 paperback...

Trade Paperback :
$18.00 Buy

Family Properties

How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America

Beryl Satter Picador

"The historian and the storyteller in Ms. Satter are never at war with each other. Family Properties is so packed with the horrors visited upon black families in Chicago from the 1940s through the 1970s that you will want to walk outside every 15 pages or so and simply scream in outrage. Yet her tone throughout is dispassionate. She is at heart a historian, not a memoirist. And she is a vertiginously good one. Her book is transfixing from its first sentence . . . the pleasures here are deep and resonant ones. Family Properties feels like something close to an instant classic."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Hardcover : $19.95 Buy	The Great Negro Plot A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York Mat Johnson Bloomsbury USA In 1741, New York City was thrown into an uproar when a sixteen-year-old white woman, an indentured servant named Mary Burton, testified that she was privy to...

Trade Paperback : $15.99 Buy	Hair Story Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps St. Martin's Griffin Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. ...

Trade Paperback :
$18.99 Buy

The Hairstons

An American Family in Black and White

Henry Wiencek St. Martin's Griffin

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several...

National Book Critics Circle Awards - Winner - Biography

Bonus

Awards

Hardcover :
$25.00 Buy

Hotter Than That

The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture

Krin Gabbard Faber and Faber, Inc.

“This is the smartest book about a single musical instrument that I've ever read. Like Miles Davis, who attended Juilliard and apprenticed with Charlie Parker, Krin Gabbard turns his immense learning into lines that are quick, witty, and irresistibly alluring. How did the trumpet emerge as the first-chair instrument in jazz history? What is this beautiful horn's significance as an instrument of desire and romance? A triumph of the new jazz studies, Hotter than That is for all who play music (especially for all trumpeters), and for all who are yearning for an enriched understanding of what and how the music called jazz means.”—Robert G. O'Meally, author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday and founder of The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University

Bonus

Trade Paperback : $18.00 Buy	I Wonder as I Wander An Autobiographical Journey Langston Hughes; Introduction by Arnold Rampersad Hill and Wang In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him...

Trade Paperback :
$18.00 Buy

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

Excerpt: Read

Trade Paperback :
$18.00 Buy

An Imperfect God

George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

Henry Wiencek Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

"[An] honest and compelling study of Washington and slavery . . . In Wiencek's superb telling, [slavery] certainly makes Washington more of a traditional planter than we have usually been willing to admit . . . Wiencek tells stories of miscegenation and incest in the Washington household that rival anything William Faulkner imagined."—Gordon S. Wood, The New York Times Book Review

More Formats: Audio

Excerpt: Listen

L.A. Times Book Prize - Winner - History

Bonus

Trade Paperback : $21.00 Buy	Islam's Black Slaves The Other Black Diaspora Ronald Segal Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks A comprehensive study of the Eastern slave trade by an eminent British scholar A companion volume to The Black Diaspora, this groundbreaking work tells the...

Trade Paperback : $15.00 Buy	King Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop Harvard Sitkoff Hill and Wang “A marvelous read and striking achievement! This engrossing and perceptive biography offers a balanced yet critical analysis of both Martin Luther King Jr. and his epochal times in their full complexity.”—Waldo Martin, U.C. Berkeley, author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America