Henry Louis Gates
Renowned scholar and New York Times bestselling author Gates delivers a stirring and authoritative companion to the major new PBS documentary America Behind the Color Line. The book includes thought-provoking essays from Colin Powell,...
Winner • NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction)
Winner • Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award
Holiday Gift Guide Selection • Indiewire, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune
These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.
Drawing from the great folklorists
...2023 PROSE Award in European History
"An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon."
—Washington Post
"Reveals how prestigious natural scientists once sought physical explanations, in vain, for a social identity that continues to carry enormous significance to this day."
—Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
"A
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents a journey through America's past and our nation's attempts at renewal in this look at the Civil War's conclusion, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow segregation.
This is a story about America during and after Reconstruction, one of history's most pivotal and misunderstood chapters. In a stirring account of emancipation, the struggle for citizenship and national reunion, and the advent of racial segregation,...#1 Bestseller
Now a major motion picture directed by Steve McQueen and starring Brad Pitt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Paul Giamatti
12 Years a Slave is a riveting true account of a free man captured and sold into slavery in the pre–Civil War South. Solomon Northup's narrative explores one of the darkest times in American history and captures in vivid detail the unimaginable
...When her master is betrothed to a woman who conceals a tragic secret, Hannah Crafts, a young slave on a wealthy North Carolina plantation, runs away in a bid for her freedom up North. Pursued by slave hunters, imprisoned by a mysterious and cruel captor, held by...
This richly illustrated edition of this classic American autobiography sheds new light on Douglass's famous text for a new generation of readers.
Famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass published his third and last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in 1881. No longer in danger as an escaped slave, it goes into greater detail and encompasses Douglass's entire life, from his early years