Experience Africa's vibrant and volatile struggle at the crossroads between tradition and modernity . . . INTO THE HOUSE OF THE ANCESTORS "Rich . . . fascinating." --The New York Times Book Review "A master of eyewitness description and of the telling interview, [Maier] has unearthed Africa's hidden heroes and heroines." --Financial Times "Maier has written a sensitive and complex narrative. . . . excellent descriptions of the lives and experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary individuals in different parts of Africa." --Richard Leakey, The Times (London) "A remarkable book. . . . It is no easy task to articulate an intangible undercurrent in an area so geographically large and culturally diverse, but Maier has succeeded admirably. Maier gives us hope that [the Africans] can rebound and even thrive. Highly recommended." --Library Journal

Published in association with the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art, Burke Museum, Seattle, Washington.

A breathtaking novel of romantic obsession, longing and one woman's choice between motherhood and her operatic calling It is 1903. Dr. Ravell is a young Harvard-educated obstetrician with a growing reputation for helping couples conceive. He has treated women from all walks of Boston society, but when Ravell meets Erika-an opera singer whose beauty is surpassed only by her spellbinding voice-he knows their doctor-patient relationship will be like none he has ever had. After struggling for years to become pregnant, Erika believes there is no hope. Her mind is made up: she will leave her prominent Bostonian husband to pursue her career in Italy, a plan both unconventional and risky. But becoming Ravell's patient will change her life in ways she never could have imagined. Lush and stunningly realized, The Doctor and the Diva moves from snowy Boston to the jungles of Trinidad to the gilded balconies of Florence. This magnificent debut is a tale of passionate love affairs, dangerous decisions, and a woman's irreconcilable desires as she is forced to choose between the child she has always longed for and the opera career she cannot live without. Inspired by the author's family history, the novel is sensual, sexy, and heart-stopping in its bittersweet beauty. Watch a Video

Dead. Some evils are so great that they transcend death. In Brandon Massey's "The Patriarch," a young writer travels to the hushed backwoods of Mississippi, where dangerous secrets surface as a generations-old feud comes to bone-chilling new life. . . Buried. The souls of the mistreated always find a way to be heard. In L.A. Banks's "Ev'ry Shut Eye Ain't Sleep," violent visions haunt a man--until he's handed an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past and prevent unspeakable acts from occurring once again. . . Forgotten. When horrors are covered up and lost, our ancestors must find a way--even in death--to tell their tales. In Tananarive Due's "Ghost Summer," ancestors haunt the nights of two children. And when a grisly discovery is made, these ancestors will make their mark on both the dead and the living. . . "Massey ventures into areas unexplored by most other black novelists. The result is artful and stunning." --Chicago Tribune "Tananarive Due is creating classics." --Tina McElroy Ansa "Banks's writing is lush and detailed, fully bringing her characters to life (or unlife), weaving a complex world of Good vs. Evil with its own intricate hierarchy." --Fangoria Magazine

Recognizing the lives of the enslaved at the historic site of Mount Clare Enslaved African Americans helped transform the United States economy, culture, and history. Yet these individuals' identities, activities, and sometimes their very existence are often all but expunged from historically preserved plantations and house museums. Reluctant to show and interpret the homes and lives of the enslaved, many sites have never shared the stories of the African Americans who once lived and worked on their land. One such site is Mount Clare near Baltimore, Maryland, where Teresa Moyer pulls no punches in her critique of racism in historic preservation. In her balanced discussion, Moyer examines the inextricably entangled lives of the enslaved, free Black people, and white landowners. Her work draws on evidence from archaeology, history, geology, and other fields to explore the ways that white privilege continues to obscure the contributions of Black people at Mount Clare. She demonstrates that a landscape's post-emancipation history can make a powerful statement about Black heritage. Ultimately she argues that the inclusion of enslaved persons in the history of these sites would honor these "ancestors of worthy life," make the social good of public history available to African Americans, and address systemic racism in America.  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Much family history focuses on digging around archives and web searches. Here, Karen Foy shows that our attics and cupboards can often hide a treasure trove of personal documents and ephemera. Boxes full of photographs, hastily written notes, old tickets, postcards, ration books, a soldier's hat, a bundle of letters, perhaps a diary, are all invaluable sources of information about our family history. These are crucial in piecing together the everyday lives of our ancestors, exposing secrets, and family relationships. You might discover favourite family recipes, information about their schooldays, reconstruct a Victorian family holiday. This book guides you through 200 years of different types of memorabilia: how to interpret them and how to use them to make your own family history – perhaps making a scrapbook or website.

The land of Ha'ena in Hawaii is known to Hawaiians as Hale Le'a (House of Pleasure and Delight). This book recounts the history of Ha'ena, outlining the relationships developed by Hawaiians with the environment as well as the impact of immigrants.

“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize • An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family's past and face its reverberations in the present, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

A powerful examination of soulful journeys made to recover memory and recuperate stolen pasts in the face of unspeakable histories. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 took refuge across the globe. Traumatized by unspeakable brutalities, the idea of returning to their homeland was unthinkable. But decades later, some children and grandchildren felt compelled to travel back, having heard stories of family wholeness in beloved homes and of cherished ancestral towns and villages once in Ottoman Armenia, today in the Republic of Turkey. Hoping to satisfy spiritual yearnings, this new generation called themselves pilgrims—and their journeys, pilgrimages. Carel Bertram joined scores of these pilgrims on over a dozen pilgrimages, and amassed accounts from hundreds more who made these journeys. In telling their stories, A House in the Homeland documents how pilgrims encountered the ancestral house, village, or town as both real and metaphorical centerpieces of family history. Bertram recounts the moving, restorative connections pilgrims made, and illuminates how the ancestral house, as a spiritual place, offers an opening to a wellspring of humanity in sites that might otherwise be defined solely by tragic loss. As an exploration of the powerful links between memory and place, house and homeland, rupture and continuity, these Armenian stories reflect the resilience of diaspora in the face of the savage reaches of trauma, separation, and exile in ways that each of us, whatever our history, can recognize.

An NPR Best Book of the Year A 2020 International Latino Book Award Finalist An Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. “You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.” When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary. With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.