“Harold Washington was one of the most spellbinding and irresistible characters I have encountered in my 40 years in journalism and politics. Part philosopher, part street brawler and always entertaining, Harold was as big and ebullient as the town he came to lead.” —David Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Barack ObamaHarold, the People's Mayor is the authorized biography of Chicago's first black mayor, written by the late civil rights activist a...

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...

An award-winning author chronicles the settling of the Ohio River Valley, home to the defiant Shawnee Indians, who vow to defend their land against the seemingly unstoppable.They came on foot and by horseback, in wagons and on rafts, singly and by the score, restless, adventurous, enterprising, relentless, seeking a foothold on the future. European immigrants and American colonists, settlers and speculators, soldiers and missionaries, fugitives from justice and fro...

The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents wit...

Peter Godwin, an award-winning writer, is on assignment in Zululand when he is summoned by his mother to Zimbabwe, his birthplace. His father is seriously ill; she fears he is dying. Godwin finds his country, once a post-colonial success story, descending into a vortex of violence and racial hatred.His father recovers, but over the next few years Godwin travels regularly between his family life in Manhattan and the increasing chaos of Zimbabwe, with its rampant inflation and land s...

In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Hacker offers a fresh and disturbing examination of the divisions of color and class in present-day America, analyzing the conditions that keep black and white Americans dangerously far apart in their ability to achieve the American dream.Why, despite continued efforts to increase understanding and expand opportunities, do black and white Americans still lead se...

In 1915, forty years after the original Ku Klux Klan disbanded, a former farmer, circuit preacher, and university lecturer named Colonel William Joseph Simmons revived the secret society. By the early 1920s the KKK had been transformed into a national movement with millions of dues-paying members and chapters in all of the nation’s forty-eight states. And unlike the Reconstruction-era society, the Klan in the 1920s exerted its influence far beyond the South. In The Rise of the Ku Klux ...

This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.

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 ...

The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jeffe...

**"Thompson's engrossing book is essential for any collection on the history, politics, or society of post–World War II America."**â• Library JournalIn Whose Detroit?, Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the African American struggles for full equality and equal justice under the law that shaped the Motor City during the 1960s and 1970s. Even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving con...

"Africa’s Children is a testament to one’s heritage, a belief in one’s ancestors, and a record of truth … no told!" – Dr. Henry V. Bishop, chief curator, Black Cultural Centre, Dartmouth, Nova ScotiaChronicling the history of Black families of the Yarmouth area of Nova Scotia, Africa’s Children is a mirror image of the hopes and despairs and the achievements and injustices that mark the early stories of many African-Canadians. This extensively researched history t...