African American Science

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved, found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor.

From its origins in the 1750s, the White-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, Black abolitionist leaders accomplished what White nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Red Summer is the first narrative history about this epic encounter.

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, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey.

Asia's mother went missing 18 years ago and since then, Asia has feared the one thing she always dreamt of working with. The ocean. So instead, she's been living life as a lab tech. She doesn't exactly love her job, but it pays the bills and she has money to spend on nights out with her girls. However, her most recent night out ends up with her gaining markings on her skin and losing body parts....

How far would you go to see justice done? How far is too far? For Madisun, the answer is simple. There are people in this world who need killing, and she's just the woman for the job!

The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together 19 essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on Black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the Black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of Black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study.

Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence.

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous Black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent White mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death.

Political activist and best-selling author Randall Robinson is a pillar of scholarship and insight within the African-American literary community. His acclaimed novel Makeda stars Gray March, a young man who, beginning in the 1950s, embarks on a journey of spiritual and historical enlightenment through stories he hears from his blind grandmother.

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to present-day anti-Black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

The Witch Sphere is in turmoil. In the years since a stunning betrayal sent shockwaves through society, the Sphere was hit with another crisis: witches are giving birth to more typics (non-witches) and their numbers are diminishing. Nadia is determined to help but finds hers efforts at the Witch Health Organization entangled with the political machinations of her powerful mother.

Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington.

In Gullah Spirituals musicologist Eric Crawford traces Gullah Geechee songs from their beginnings in West Africa to their height as songs for social change and Black identity in the 20th-century American South. While much has been done to study, preserve, and interpret Gullah culture in the Low Country and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, some traditions like the shouting and rowing songs have been all but forgotten.

Wise Black women have known for centuries that the blues have been a platform for truth-telling, an underground musical railroad to survival, and an essential form of resistance, healing, and learning. In her highly anticipated follow-up to the widely acclaimed Pushout, now a core text for teachers and principals on the criminalization of Black girls in schools, leading advocate Monique W. Morris invokes the spirit of the blues to articulate a radically healing and empowering pedagogy for Black and Brown girls.

When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali—a seemingly benevolent alien race—intervened in the fate of the humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth—but salvation comes at a price.

Step into a world of heritage, identity, and empowerment with Moorish Science Temple of America: A Beginner’s Guide: The History, Teachings, and Practices Unveiled. This is more than just a book—it’s a gateway to understanding the profound legacy of Noble Drew Ali and the movement that reshaped the lives of countless individuals. Discover how the Moorish Science Temple of America revolutionized cultural identity, blending history, spirituality, and civic empowerment into a transformative path of self-discovery. Whether you’re new to the subject or seeking to deepen your knowledge, ...

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together 18 essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with 36 poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization's broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party's health activism was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor Blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.