A look at African Americans’ contributions to the United States by the iconic leader whose life spanned from the Civil War to the civil rights movement. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and a cofounder of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois remains a towering figure in US history. In The Gift of Black Folk, he celebrates Black Americans’ struggle for equality—a battle that would continue long after slavery was abolished—and in the ongoing pursuit of a more perfect union. As explorers, laborers, soldiers, artists, slaves, freedmen, and citizens, these individuals played an essential part in the unique conglomerate that is the United States, and their remarkable, often unsung history is conveyed in this classic work.

In the Jim Crow era, along with black churches, schools, and newspapers, African Americans also had their own history. Making Black History focuses on the engine behind the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Author Jeffrey Aaron Snyder shows how the study and celebration of black history became an increasingly important part of African American life over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century. It was the glue that held African Americans together as “a people,” a weapon to fight racism, and a roadmap to a brighter future. Making Black History takes an expansive view of the historical enterprise, covering not just the production of black history but also its circulation, reception, and performance. Woodson, the only professional historian whose parents had been born into slavery, attracted a strong network of devoted members to the ASNLH, including professional and lay historians, teachers, students, “race” leaders, journalists, and artists. They all grappled with a set of interrelated questions: Who and what is “Negro”? What is the relationship of black history to American history? And what are the purposes of history? Tracking the different answers to these questions, Snyder recovers a rich public discourse about black history that took shape in journals, monographs, and textbooks and sprang to life in the pages of the black press, the classrooms of black schools, and annual celebrations of Negro History Week. By lining up the Negro history movement’s trajectory with the wider arc of African American history, Snyder changes our understanding of such signal aspects of twentieth-century black life as segregated schools, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emerging modern civil rights movement.

The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance, which for many decades did not attract a lot of scholarly attention, until, in the 1990s, many scholars discovered how complex, significant, and fascinating it was. Using African American published texts, American archives and unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book focuses both on the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and on writers who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significance for the movement, such as Wallace Thurman. Its perspective combines gender, sexuality, and race studies with a thorough literary analysis and historicist investigation, an approach that has not been extensively applied to analyze the New Negro Renaissance.

Traces the history of black people in America from the arrival of the first slave ships to the civil rights movements of the 1960's.

In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

This companion volume to the four-part PBS series on the history of American slavery--narrated by Morgan Freeman and scheduled to air in February 2006--illuminates the human side of this inhumane institution, presenting it largely through the stories of the slaves themselves. Features 120 illustrations.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

A director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard presents a sumptuously illustrated chronicle of more than 500 years of African-American history that focuses on defining events, debates and controversies as well as important achievements of famous and lesser-known figures, in a volume complemented by reproductions of ancient maps and historical paraphernalia. (This title was previously list in Forecast.)