"Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts is an eye-opening documentary that explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his...

"Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we...

"Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the tomb of Marie Laveau in New Orleans. In this old city she and her curse long have ruled the imagination. She has been conjured in dance, drumming, song, and necromancy. With dread and fierce affection, her celebrants ask for her favors and fearfully revere her enduring authority as "the Voodoo Queen."" "Who was Marie Laveau?". "This book about her mysterious life, magical deeds, and pervasive power recounts...

A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow-era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar. If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law? In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between...

Epic adventure, set in the Amazon, about a Spanish Jesuit priest and a military man who unite to protect an Indian tribe from pro-slavery Portugal, also expanding its colonial empire to 18th century Brazil.

""I consider you my best living friend," Mary Lincoln wrote to Elizabeth Keckly in 1867, and indeed theirs was a close, if tumultuous, relationship. Born into slavery, mulatto Elizabeth Keckly was Mary Lincoln's dressmaker, confidante, and mainstay during the difficult years that the Lincoln's occupied the White House and the early years of Mary's widowhood. But she was a fascinating woman in her own right, independent and already well-established...

From the publisher. "While some have boasted it as a work from Heaven, others have given it a less righteous origin. I have many reasons to believe that it is the work of plain, honest men." -- Robert Morris, delegate from Pennsylvania to the Constitutional Convention From distinguished historian Richard Beeman comes a dramatic and engrossing account of the men who met in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to design a radically new form of government....

"The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader collects in one volume the most outstanding and representative work from Frederick Douglass's fifty-year writing career, including all the major genres in which he worked: autobiography, journalism, oratory, and fiction. The Reader contains the following classic texts in their entirety: the landmark fugitive slave narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845); the consummate anti-slavery...

"A gathering of essays by the acclaimed Harvard legal scholar and public intellectual, that explores all the relevant cultural and historical issues of the past quarter century having to do with race and race relations in America. With a gimlet eye, decency and humaneness (and often courting controversy), Randall Kennedy chronicles his reactions over the past quarter century to arguments, events, and people that have compelled him to put pen to paper....

Banished by her grandfather at the age of eighteen, Spring Lee has survived scandal to claim her own little slice of Paradise, Wyoming. She's proud of working her ranch alone and unwilling to share it with a stranger - especially one like Garrett McCray, who makes her second-guess her resolve to avoid men. Garrett escaped slavery years ago and is now a reporter in Washington. He's traveled west to interview Dr. Colton Lee for an article, yet it's...