""It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States."--Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts...

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong--warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, renowned math historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell make the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than...

A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2024 A leading historian exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America.In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it...

"A descendant of a slave named Coreen, and-according to oral tradition-her owner, President James Madison, finally shares her family's story."-- Provided by publisher.

"From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's similarly provocative Invasion of Privacy almost thirty years...

"Mays explores the relationship and differences between the Black American quest for freedom and the Native American struggle for sovereignty in the U.S"-- Provided by publisher. The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America. Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary...

"A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue - and its fascinating role in Black history and culture - from National Book Award winner Imani Perry. Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache,...

"With We Carry Their Bones, Erin Kimmerle continues to unearth the true story of the Dozier School, a tale more frightening than any fiction. In a corrupt world, her unflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice." –Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of The Nickel Boys and The Underground RailroadForensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle investigates of the notorious Dozier Boys School—the true story behind the Pulitzer...

“Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an eminent Dean of American journalism, a vital voice whose work chronicled the civil rights movement and so much of what has transpired since then. My People is the definitive collection of her reportage and commentary. Spanning datelines in the American South, South Africa and points scattered in between, her work constitutes a history of our time as rendered by the pen of a singular and indispensable black woman journalist.”-Jelani...

"National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis's own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story Sitting beneath a stained-glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, it struck Lewis that he knew very little about those ancestors. And so, in his mid-80s, the esteemed historian began to excavate their...