In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair. Ashe is a fresh, new voice that addresses the importance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an accessible, humorous, ...

Born in the United States and enslaved as a child, Harriet Tubman (circa 1820-1913) is one of the best-known figures connected to the Underground Railroad. Through her knowledge and outdoor survival skills, honed through her unpaid labour in the fields and through the later connections she made in the abolitionist community, Tubman was well poised to command her followers. By her discipline and example, she never lost a "passenger."Tubman's exploits helped to empower those opposed ...

In her nuanced, extremely perceptive book, Laina Dawes champions the liberating possibilities of metal while questioning the color-blindness of the metal world, celebrating the role of black women in creating rock music, examining the reaction of the black community to black punks and metalheads, and sorting out the gender issues that complicate sisterhood in a male-dominated sphere. Her thoughtful treatise on the power of music and identity challenges black women in the metal scene to joi...

Mr. Washington, more than any other writer or lecturer, has solved the "race problem." The historical value of the book, and its uplifting influence give ''The Story Of My Life And Work'' a prominent place in modern literature. It is a volume for the family library along with the Life of Franklin, Emerson's Essays and the great autobiographies. There is no greaterstimulus for self-help, for Mr. Washington forged his way to the front by his own efforts.

A rediscovered, defiant work of Native American literature, presented here on the 175th anniversary of its first publicationUpon its publication in 1833, this unflinching narrative by the vanquished Sauk leader Black Hawk was the first thoroughly adversarial account of frontier hostilities between white settlers and Native Americans. Black Hawk, a complex, contradictory figure, relates his life story and that of his people, who had been forced from western Illinois...

Leaving behind a sparkling social life and a successful journalism career, Eleni Gage moved from New York City to the remote Greek village of Lia. Lia is the same village where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, and which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous twenty years ago with his international bestseller Eleni.Her four aunts (the diminutive but formidable thitsas) warned Eleni that she'd get killed by Albanians and eaten by wolves if she moved ...

This rags-to-riches history of three generations offers a "terrifically readable, compelling" look at the Chinese middle class and the immigrant experience ( Publishers Weekly).In 1864, at the age of twelve, Jeu Dip left southern China for America. In San Francisco, he reinvented himself as Joseph Tape, an immigration broker whose new life allowed his family to become one of the first of a brand-new social type: middle-class Chinese Americans.As the...

An unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women...

The unique narrative of a slave who fled to freedom and sailed aboard a whaling vesselJohn Thompson was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in 1812. Originally published in 1856, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave chronicles his enslavement, his escape, and his life in the North, where he lived as a free man until fear of recapture drove him to flee once again-this time to sea aboard the Milwood, a whaling vessel. The only fugitive...

Heartwarming stories about a family of sharecroppers living by the white man's rules in rural Georgia during the 1920s and 1930s. You'll laugh and you'll cry, but you will always learn. And through it all, you will come to admire the courage, determination, and joy shown by the author and her family as they overcame the challenges of life in the Old South.

Few were more qualified than Dempsey Travis to write the history of African Americans in Chicago, and none would be able to do it with the same command of firsthand sources. This seminal paperback reissue, An Autobiography of Black Chicago, emulates the best works of Studs Terkel - portraying the African American Chicago community through the personal experiences of Dempsey Travis, his family, and his fellow Chicagoans. Through his family's and his own experiences, plus those of t...

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of a range of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arr...