African America Revolution

The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt.

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha.

The Plasma Pioneer reveals the remarkable true story of Charles Richard Drew, the African American physician whose scientific genius collided with the brutal realities of segregated America. When the U.S. military demanded that blood donations be segregated by race—despite Drew's own research proving the practice scientifically baseless—he made a decision that would define his legacy: he resigned from the program he created rather than compromise his principles.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent - that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts.

When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, it was perhaps the most hotly contested topic. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. In this study, Gordon-Reed assembles a fascinating and convincing argument that the evidence for the affair has been denied a fair hearing.

It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow terrorism. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood follows Ludger Boguille, his family, and friends through landmark events that shaped New Orleans and the United States.

Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.

Experience the Authentic Pulse of City Life. Author TARU brings a masterful fusion of genres to the page, combining the raw, uncompromising energy of street literature with the profound, character-driven depth of urban fiction. TARU's narratives are more than just stories—they are vivid explorations of complex themes, delivering unforgettable, high-impact reading. Born into the labyrinthine depths of modern urban America, Silas Page's extraordinary journey begins in the grim fluorescent glow of a Detroit hospital. Orphaned and thrust into a system designed to contain rather than nurture, ...

Few television shows revolutionized comedy as profoundly or have had such an enormous and continued impact on our culture as In Living Color. Inspired by Richard Pryor, Carol Burnett, and Eddie Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans created a television series unlike any that had come before it. In Living Color shaped American culture in ways both seen and unseen. Now, Homey Don't Play That! reveals the complete, captivating story of how In Living Color overcame enormous odds to become a major, zeitgeist-seizing hit.

The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters—two white and free, one black and enslaved—and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America FINALIST FOR THE GEORGE WASHINGTON PRIZE “Beautifully written . . . To a nuanced study of Jefferson’s...

In Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis sums up a lifetime of insight. He looks at slavery in the American South; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of slaves; the destructive internal long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism.

This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war. Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.

In a sweeping account, Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped the experiences of the peoples living in the watershed of the Atlantic Ocean between the late Middle Ages and the Age of Revolution.

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved, found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor.

This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

In Madison’s Militia, Carl T. Bogus illuminates why James Madison and the First Congress included the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights. Linking together dramatic accounts of slave uprisings and electric debates over whether the Constitution should be ratified, Bogus shows that—contrary to conventional wisdom—the fitting symbol of the Second Amendment is not the musket in the hands of the minuteman on Lexington Green but the musket wielded by a slave patrol member in the South.

Running from Bondage, Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America, explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role.

The political and military nature of the Revolutionary War was just as full of intrigue. While disorganized militias fought the Battles of Lexington & Concord, George Washington would lead the Continental Army in the field while men like Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia and Benjamin Franklin negotiated overseas in France.