Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as "friends" and "allies" of slaves and sheds light on the political importance of ostensible private struggles, and on the political agendas at work in framing the domestic as private and household relations as personal.Recommended by the Association of Black Women Historians.

    Perhaps no other writer is as synonymous with Harlem as James Baldwin (1924-1987). The events there that shaped his youth greatly influenced Baldwin's work, much of which focused on his experiences as a black man in white America. Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and Giovanni's Room are just a few of his classic fiction and nonfiction books that remain an essential part of the American canon. In Baldwin's Harlem, award-winning journalist Herb Boyd combines impeccable biographical research with astute literary criticism, and reveals to readers Baldwin's association with Harlem on both metaphorical and realistic levels. For example, Boyd describes Baldwin's relationship with Harlem Renaissance poet laureate Countee Cullen, who taught Baldwin French in the ninth grade. Packed with telling anecdotes, Baldwin's Harlem illuminates the writer's diverse views and impressions of the community that would remain a consistent presence in virtually all of his writing. Baldwin's Harlem provides an intelligent and enlightening look at one of America's most important literary enclaves.

    The novel opens at the beginning of the 20th century with a community gathering to heal the mysterious illness of a young woman, Ella, who has returned to Jamaica after an unsuccessful marriage abroad. The Afro-Jamaican religion myal, which asserts that good has the power to conquer all, is invoked to heal Ella, who has been left “zombified” and devoid of any black soul. Ella, who is light skinned enough to pass for white, has suffered a breakdown after her white American husband produced a black-face minstrel show based on the stories of her village and childhood. This cultural appropriation is one of a series Ella encountered in her life, and parallels the ongoing theft of the labor and culture of colonized peoples for imperial gain and pleasure. The novel’s rich, vivid language and vital characters earned it the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean.

    Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms.

    What is at stake in male homo/heterosexual definition? Through readings of Melville, Nietzsche, Wilde, James and Proust, the author argues that the vexed imperatives to specify straight and gay identities have become central to every important form of knowledge of the 20th century.

     An eye-opening book that tells the important, overlooked story of black women as a force in the suffrage movement--when fellow suffragists did not accept them as equal partners in the struggle.Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Alice Paul. The Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. The 1913 Women's March in D.C. When the epic story of the suffrage movement in the United States is told, the most familiar leaders, speakers at meetings, and participants in marches written about or pictured are generally white.The real story isn't monochromatic.Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn't just about gender. African American women had to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity--and safety--in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks.Lifting as We Climb is the empowering story of African American women who refused to accept all this. Women in black church groups, black female sororities, black women's improvement societies and social clubs. Women who formed their own black suffrage associations when white-dominated national suffrage groups rejected them. Women like Mary Church Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and of the NAACP; or educator-activist Anna Jullia Cooper who championed women getting the vote and a college education; or the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, a leader in both the suffrage and anti-lynching movements.Author Evette Dionne, a feminist culture writer and the editor-in-chief of Bitch Media, has uncovered an extraordinary and underrepresented history of black women. In her powerful book, she draws an important historical line from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to contemporary young activists--filling in the blanks of the American suffrage story.

    It gave us the concept of the global village; that phrase has now been translated, along with the rest of the book, into twelve languages, from Japanese to Serbo-Croat. It helped establish Marshall McLuhan as the original 'media guru.' More than 200,000 copies are in print. The reissue of this landmark book reflects the continuing importance of McLuhan's work for contemporary readers.

    Now she uses that voice to deliver what is at once a fiercely candid autobiography and a survival manual for any African American woman determined to keep her heart open and her integrity intact in 1990s America.

    The same is true for gifted, prolific, women poets of the Harlem Renaissance who are little known, especially as compared to their male counterparts. In this poetry collection, bestselling author Nikki Grimes uses "The Golden Shovel" poetic method to create wholly original poems based on the works of these groundbreaking women-and to introduce readers to their work. Each poem is paired with one-of-a-kind art from today's most exciting female African-American illustrators: Vanessa Brantley-Newton, Cozbi A. Cabrera, Nina Crews, Pat Cummings, Laura Freeman, Jan Spivey Gilchrist, Ebony Glenn, April Harrison, Vashti Harrison, Ekua Holmes, Cathy Ann Johnson, Keisha Morris, Daria Peoples-Riley, Andrea Pippins, Erin Robinson, Shadra Strickland, Nicole Tadgell, and Elizabeth Zunon. Legacy also includes a foreword, an introduction to the history of the Harlem Renaissance, author's note, and poet biographies, which make this a wonderful resource and a book to cherish. Acclaim for One Last Word A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor winnerA New York Public Library Best Kids Book of the YearA Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Middle GradeA School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Nonfiction

    In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival.In dazzling comparisons with the experience of other postcolonial peoples, the author makes many overdue connections. Rejecting the notion that artists such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern to the extent that they made themselves "European," he contends that the Irish experience was a dramatic instance of experimental modernity and shows how the country's artists blazed a trail that led directly to the magic realism of a Garc a M rquez or a Rushdie. Along the way, he reveals the vital importance of Protestant values and the immense contributions of women to the enterprise. Kiberd's analysis of the culture is interwoven with sketches of the political background, bringing the course of modern Irish literature into sharp relief against a tragic history of conflict, stagnation, and change.Inventing Ireland restores to the Irish past a sense of openness that it once had and that has since been obscured by narrow-gauge nationalists and their polemical revisionist critics. In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish Studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.

    In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements. A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina, before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected on account of her race. Deciding to become a lawyer, she graduated first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study at Harvard University on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall challenge segregation frontally in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. When appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination. In 1965, she became the first African American to earn a JSD from Yale Law School and the following year persuaded Betty Friedan to found an NAACP for women, which became NOW. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women--and potentially other minority groups--from discrimination. By that time, Murray was a tenured history professor at Brandeis, a position she left to become the first woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church in 1976.Murray accomplished all this while struggling with issues of identity. She believed from childhood she was male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone. While she would today be identified as transgender, during her lifetime no social movement existed to support this identity. She ultimately used her private feelings of being "in-between" to publicly contend that identities are not fixed, an idea that has powered campaigns for equal rights in the United States for the past half-century.

    Long an iconic figure for radicals, Huey Newton is now being discovered by those interested in the history of America's social movements. This new release of a classic collection of his writings and speeches traces the development of Newton's personal and political thinking, as well as the radical changes that took place in the formative years of the Black Panther Party.With a rare and persuasive honesty, To Die for the People records the Party's internal struggles, rivalries and contradictions, and the result is a fascinating look back at a young revolutionary group determined to find ways to deal with the injustice it saw in American society. And, as a new foreword by Elaine Brown makes eminently clear, Newton's prescience and foresight make these documents strikingly pertinent today.

    Inventing the Truth offers wisdom from nine notable memoirists about their process (Ian Frazier searched through generations of family papers to understand his parents' lives), the hurdles they faced (Annie Dillard tackles the central dilemma of memoir: what to put in and what to leave out), and the unexpected joys of bringing their pasts to the page. Featured authors include Russell Baker on Growing Up; Jill Ker Conway on The Road from Coorain; Annie Dillard on An American Childhood; Ian Frazier on Family; Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Colored People; Alfred Kazin on A Walker in the City; Frank McCourt on Angela's Ashes; Toni Morrison on Beloved; and Eileen Simpson on Poets in Their Youth.

    Instead, she discovered that life at The Post meant walking "the thin line between Uncle Tomming and Mau-Mauing" - between holding onto her job and preserving her soul.As Nelson recounts her harrowing four years at The Post - along with her odyssey from a middle-class childhood to near poverty, divorce and single motherhood, flame-out love affairs, and a nervous breakdown - she gives us a scalding expose of the racial, sexual, and corporate politics of one of our most respected newspapers. Volunteer Slavery is a funny, fiercely candid book that names names and takes no prisoners.

    It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.