Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school―in her sixties―to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the i...

A New York Times bestseller: “This terrific new book . . . [explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive.”—Boston GlobeTelling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A ...

2024 New York Times Notable Book of the YearFinalist: The 2025 PEN/Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for the Art of the Essays“Painter puts muscle and heart into history so that her readers can easily, but thoughtfully, draw the lines between past and present. Her history is inclusive, not in a pandering or self-consciously correct way, but because her artful telling of it is full of complexity that’s both beautiful and bracing.”...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it.Throughout her prolific writing career, Nell Painter has published works on such luminaries as Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Malcolm X. Her unique vantage on Ameri...

The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, we often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangle...

"A triumph of scholarly maturity, imagination, and narrative art." —Arnold RampersadSojourner Truth: formerly enslaved person and unforgettable abolitionist of the mid-nineteenth century, a figure of imposing physique, a riveting preacher and spellbinding singer who dazzled listeners with her wit and originality. Straight-talking and unsentimental, Truth became an early national symbol for strong Black women—indeed, for all strong women.In this modern class...

**“A gripping and forceful narrative.”—Nancy F. Cott, author of Public VowsAn “enthralling” (Michael Kazin, Washington Post) account of America’s shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial society.**In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological innovation made possible dramatic increases in industrial and agricultural productivity; by 1919, per capita gross national product had soared. But this new wealth and n...

"The first full-length scholarly study of this migration and of the forces that produced it."—David H. Donald, New York Times Book ReviewThe first major migration to the North of ex-slaves.

Standing at Armageddon is a comprehensive and lively historical account of America's shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial society.

One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in AmericaA haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published pseduonymously in 1861, tells firsthand of the horrors inflicted on slaves. In writing this extraordinary memoir, which culminates in the seven years she spent hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother's attic, Ja...

She Votes is an intersectional story of the women who won suffrage, and those who have continued to raise their voices for equality ever since.From the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation to the first woman to wear pants on the Senate floor, author Bridget Quinn shines a spotlight on the women who broke down barriers.This book also honors the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment with illust...

Narrative of Sojourner Truth is one of the most important documents of slavery ever written, as well as being a partial autobiography of the woman who became a pioneer in the struggles for racial and sexual equality. With an eloquence that resonates more than a century after its original publication in 1850, the narrative bears witness to Sojourner Truth's thirty years of bondage in upstate New York and to the mystical revelations that turned her into a passionate and indefatigable aboliti...