A rural village that was once the entry point for the slave trade and home to a cotton plantation, Scotlandville became the largest majority African American town in Louisiana. Located in the northern part of East Baton Rouge Parish, Scotlandville's history is intricately tied to Southern University and A&M College System, the only historically black university system in the United States. Southern University relocated from New Orleans to the bluff of the Mississippi River on the western e...

"Fascinating. . . . [Graham] has made a major contribution both to African-American studies and the larger American picture." —New York TimesDebutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha's Vineyard. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of America’s Black upper class and the focus of the first book written abo...

Explore the Black history of the San Francisco Bay Area through the work of the region's first Black professional photographer.From 1927 until his death in 1979, Oakland's E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender but not widely published in his home community. A graduate of the American School of Photography in Illinois, Joseph photographed the likes of suc...

Edenton and Chowan County, North Carolina is a pictorial history that celebrates early 20th-century lifestyles enjoyed by citizensof the first unofficial colonial capital. Conveniently located between three important waterways in Eastern North Carolina, Chowan County, along with its county seat of Edenton, is a remarkable community whose roots dig deeply into the 1600s when settlers arrived from Jamestown. The steadfast Perquimans River to the east, the rapidly flowing Chowan River to the ...

Limited Edition, Iosco County, Michigan, some Early History of the area, with some family histories and including those of some local businesses and facilities.

In the early 1920s, when T.W. House Jr., A.C. Guthrie, and Thomas Ball came to the conclusion that Houston needed a new country club, complete with an 18-hole golf course, they formed Country Club Estates. They chose to build on land called the House tract just west of downtown. Very quickly, 300 memberships were sold, with each including one share of stock in the company. Within a year, Will and Mike Hogg, along with Hugh Potter, recognized this as a perfect idea for the bustling city of ...

The history of York College of Pennsylvania begins shortly after the Revolutionary War. The college traces its lineage directly to three ancestral schools. The foundation was York County Academy, an English classical school chartered in 1787. The academy merged in 1929 with York Collegiate Institute, founded in 1873. Under one roof, both schools survived the Great Depression. In 1941, the charter was amended to allow two years of college-level courses and the institution became York Junior...

Golden Days includes twenty oral histories of women who graduated from Mississippi State College for Women (now Mississippi University for Women) at least fifty years ago. From Mary Ellen Weathersby Pope's (1926) description of a teaching career beginning just before the 1927 Delta flood to Juanita McCown Hight's (1934) account of campus conversations with violinist Jascha Heifetz and writer/adventurer Richard Halliburton, these stories illustrate the profound influence of the nat...

Wilson, North Carolina was formed in 1849 when the villages of Toisnot and Hickory Grove merged together. Named for Mexican War hero Gen. Louis D. Wilson, the new town came to be known for agriculture and education. The Wilson of today holds fast to its roots, offering antique shops laden with treasures from all walks of life and nationally recognized historic districts brimming with remarkable structures, significant styles of architecture, and numerous locations to taste the famed Easter...

The town of Ogden and the village of Spencerport were considered pioneer country when the first settlers arrived in 1801 from Connecticut, seeking more fertile farmland. The two communities witnessed the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and survived through the rise and fall of the importance of that waterway. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, many farms produced and sold vast amounts of produce, shipped via the canal. Since the time of their agrarian roots, Ogden and Spencerp...

Covington is the seat of St. Tammany Parish government and sits north of Lake Pontchartrain in the New Orleans metropolitan area. Records from 1727 show 11 Africans on the north shore. One person of African descent was present at the founding of Covington on July 4, 1813. Most African Americans in antebellum Covington were slaves, with a modest number of free people, all of whom covered nearly every occupation needed for the development and sustenance of a heavily forested region. For more...

Since the 1789 charter of the country�s first state university, Chapel Hill has attracted people from all over who found that the town was the perfect place to put down roots. In this collection, local newspaper columnist Valarie Schwartz celebrates many of Chapel Hill�s most notable residents, from the World War II veteran who came to law school after the war and ended up as president of the UNC system for thirty years to the couple from the Midwest who arrived in 1935 and spent their car...