I spent the last eleven years listening to people describe the worst day of their lives and how they found the grace and courage to persevere. Little in my professional training as a historian prepared me to sit with them and help them make sense of their past. Each of these books offers pathways to recapturing a violent past and imagining how we keep living.
I wrote
Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa
I worked with members of Stevenson’s staff to research victims of lynching in Tuscaloosa in 2016 and heard him preach at First African Baptist as part of a commemoration service.
His call that day, amplified in this book, was to confront histories of racial violence and discrimination and ask why–why do they exist, why do we avoid them? He promised that the search for answers would change us, as it had him–make us more empathetic and critical about the truth of our shared past. I believed him.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN, JAMIE FOXX, AND BRIE LARSON.
A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, ESQUIRE, AND TIME BOOK OF THE YEAR.
A #1 New York Times bestseller, this is a powerful, true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix America's broken justice system, as seen in the HBO documentary True Justice.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. One in every 15 people born there today is expected to go
to prison. For black men this figure rises to one…
It is hard to forget the ghosts and spirits haunting this book. They register the pain of slavery and dare us to look away. Little in my education as a historian equipped me to engage stories of loss and violence.
Morrison turned to fiction to restore a balanced view of American history, leaving us with a question: what tools do we need to unlock hidden histories? I think about this question every time I write.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
It is 1948 in Berlin. The economy is broken, the currency worthless, and the Russian bear is preparing to swallow its next victim. In the ruins of Hitler's capital, former RAF officers and a woman pilot start an air ambulance company that offers a glimmer of hope. Yet when a…
Du Bois taught me how to be a historian. I began reading him while riding a bus home from a summer job in Boston and missed my stop by two miles.
He insisted that scholars engage in struggles for justice and refuse to spend their professional lives behind stacks of books. He demanded that we center the lives of the forgotten in our writing and allow them to tell us how to write history.
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.
The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works…
It took McWhorter eighteen years to unlock the secrets of Birmingham, where she grew up. This is the finest local civil rights movement study, a sweeping story of Black courage in the face of repression.
It is also a deeply personal story. Asking why so many whites violently defended the color line, she found her answer hidden deep inside her own family’s history.
Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the Civil Rights Era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation.
"The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
Miles made me demand more of history. She writes a fascinating tale of love and belonging based on sources outside formal archives.
The book warns us about the dangers of blindly accepting traditional ways of writing history. It reminds us that we must seek new approaches to representing the past if we ever hope to tell broader, more truthful stories.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE
'A remarkable book' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times 'A brilliant exercise in historical excavation and recovery' - Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello 'A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness' - Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was…
For 60 years, Black citizens in Tuscaloosa have begged city and state leaders to tell the truth about one of the most violent days in the civil rights movement. They wanted the world to know that on June 9, 1964, police and Klansmen brutalized over 500 Black people huddled inside First African Baptist Church. They called it Bloody Tuesday.
It remains the largest assault and invasion of a Black church by law enforcement during the civil rights movement. More were injured and arrested than on Bloody Sunday in Selma eight months later. This is one of the last great untold stories of the civil rights movement, covered up by the city and state for generations until now.
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by…
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in…
