Edda L. Fields-Black’s revelatory Combee narrates the 1863 Combahee River Raid, in which Harriet Tubman led Black soldiers to liberate more than 700 enslaved people.
Page by page, Joy-Ann Reid’s Medgar and Myrlie paints unforgettable portraits of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, two American heroes who faced American racism with unimaginable courage.
In The War Before the War, Andrew Delbanco shares the stories of freedom seekers and shows how they were instrumental in bringing attention to the horrors of slavery.
Hannah Durkin’s authoritative The Survivors of the Clotilda cuts through the myths around the notorious last slave ship to dock in the United States.
Aarathi Prasad’s entertaining and enlightening history of silk brims with story and scientific detail, revealing a surprising history well worth knowing.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Harvard introductory course in African American Studies is legendary. Who among us would hesitate to attend a lecture with the award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist and cultural critic? The Black Box distills the lessons of the seminar as Gates tracks the Black authors who have sought self-definition through writing across genres to create places of belonging.
Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s new anthology offers a look at the human toll of Iran’s authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.
In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Laron crafts a tale of hold-your-breath suspense about the crucial three months leading up to the Civil War.
In 1911, 12 Black men were delivered to the forest in rural Maryland and began building their new residence, the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. During its near century of existence, the hospital (re-named Crownsville) held patients in prisonlike conditions without offering them adequate medical attention, food, space or safety. In Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, Emmy-winning journalist Antonia Hylton summoned extensive archival research and conducted dozens of interviews with former patients and staff, as well as their descendants, to offer an unsparing reckoning with history.
Benjamin Breen’s smart, entertaining Tripping on Utopia brings the history of psychedelic science vividly to life.
In the meticulously researched and enlightening American Patriots, Ralph Young illustrates the crucial role of dissent in our democracy.
Deborah G. Plant’s indictment of America’s criminal justice system, Of Greed and Glory, has the power of a sermon and the urgency of a manifesto.
Benjamin E. Park’s absorbing history of Mormonism, American Zion, effectively argues that the faith’s evolution mirrors the struggle of American society.
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