Browse by Subject: African American History

Please note that while you may order forthcoming books at any time, they will not be available for shipment until shortly before publication date

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Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era

This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, showing how enslaved and free African Americans resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort in a borderland that changed hands frequently during the Civil War.

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Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization

Countering assumptions that the West African colony of Liberia was an endpoint in the journeys of the free people of color who traveled there, Robert Murray reveals that many Liberian settlers returned repeatedly to the United States, and he explores the ways this movement shaped the construction of race in the Atlantic world.

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A Struggle for Heritage: Archaeology and Civil Rights in a Long Island Community

Based on ten years of collaborative, community-based research, this book examines the history of race and racism in a mixed-heritage Native American and African American community on Long Island’s North Shore, demonstrating how archaeology can be an activist voice for a vulnerable population’s civil rights.

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Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice

This book is a sweeping story of black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, told through the life and work of twentieth-century environmental activist Pauulu Kamarakafego. Quito Swan shows how Kamarakafego helped connect liberation efforts of the African diaspora throughout the Global South.

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Black Panther in Exile: The Pete O'Neal Story

This book tells the story of Pete O’Neal, one of the most influential members of the Black Panther Party, who now lives in exile in Tanzania—unable to return to the United States but refusing to renounce his past.

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The Public Health Nurses of Jim Crow Florida

Highlighting the long unacknowledged role of a group of pioneering professional women, The Public Health Nurses of Jim Crow Florida tells the story of healthcare workers who battled racism in a state where white supremacy formed the bedrock of society. They aimed to serve those people out of reach of modern medical care.  

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NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement

Examining the ways in which NASA’s goal of space exploration both conflicted and aligned with the cause of racial equality, this volume provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.

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Sallie Ann Robinson's Kitchen: Food and Family Lore from the Lowcountry

In her third cookbook, Sallie Ann Robinson brings readers to the dinner table in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Born and raised on the small, remote island of Daufuskie, Robinson shares the food and foodways from her Gullah upbringing.  

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Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle

This volume highlights the little-known story of Robert R. Church Jr., the most prominent black Republican of the 1920s and 1930s. Tracing Church’s lifelong crusade to make race an important part of the national political conversation, Darius Young reveals how Church was critical to the formative years of the civil rights struggle.  

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Global Garveyism

Arguing that the accomplishments of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and his followers have been marginalized in narratives of the black freedom struggle, this volume builds on decades of overlooked research to reveal the profound impact of Garvey’s post–World War I black nationalist philosophy around the globe and across the twentieth century.