New and classic books that explore Black lives, history, culture, and experiences, ranging from a groundbreaking theory of Black education to a lyrical meditation on Black leadership today.
Author - Editorial Staff
Date - 23 January 2024
Time to read - 1 min
During Black History Month, receive 30% off these books with promo code BHM30 at checkout.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
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We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Begin Again, a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary Black Americans can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and pursue self-cultivation and grassroots movements to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.
We are more than the circ*mstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are th...
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Ancestral Genomics
African American Health in the Age of Precision Medicine
Constance B. Hilliard
A leading evolutionary historian offers a radical solution to racial health disparities in the United States.
Constance B. Hilliard was living in Japan when she began experiencing joint pain. Her doctor diagnosed osteoarthritis—a common ailment for someone her age. But her bloodwork showed something else: Hilliard, who had never had kidney problems, appeared to be suffering from renal failu...
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Who’s Black and Why?
A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew S. Curran
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, autho...Get the book
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A Secret among the Blacks
Slave Resistance before the Haitian Revolution
John D. Garrigus
A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world.
Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret among the Blacks, John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resistance to deadly environmental and p...
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Fugitive Pedagogy
Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching
Jarvis R. Givens
A fresh portrayal of one of the architects of the African American intellectual tradition, whose faith in the subversive power of education will inspire teachers and learners today.
“As departments…scramble to decolonize their curriculum, Givens illuminates a longstanding counter-canon in predominantly black schools and colleges.”
—Boston Review“Informative and inspiring…An homag...
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Traveling Black
A Story of Race and Resistance
Mia Bay
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the David J. Langum Prize
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award
Winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award
A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year“This extraordinary book is a powerful addition to the history of travel segregation…Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been...
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Liner Notes for the Revolution
The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Daphne A. Brooks
Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation
Winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award
Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award
A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year
A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Summer Read“Brooks traces all kinds of lines…inviting v...
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Being Property Once Myself
Blackness and the End of Man
Joshua Bennett
Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize
“This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways…African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluati...
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The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard
Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Committee
The Presidential Committee on the Legacy of Slavery
Harvard’s searing and sobering indictment of its own long-standing relationship with chattel slavery and anti-Black discrimination.
In recent years, scholars have documented extensive relationships between American higher education and slavery. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard adds Harvard University to the long list of institutions, in the North and the South, entangled with slavery and i...
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Tacky’s Revolt
The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Vincent Brown
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the Elsa Goveia Book Prize
Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations
Winner of the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize
Winner of the Harriet Tubman Prize
Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award
Finalist for the Cundill Prize“Brilliant…groundbreaking…Bro...
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The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
With a New Preface
Glenn C. Loury
“Lifts and transforms the discourse on ‘race’ and racial justice to an entirely new level.”
—Orlando Patterson“Intellectually rigorous and deeply thoughtful…An incisive, erudite book by a major thinker.”
—Gerald Early, New York Times Book ReviewWhy are black Americans so persistently confined to the margins of society? And why do they fail across so many metrics—wages, unempl...
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Racism in America
A Reader
Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black racism through the eyes...
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Marking Time
Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A New York Review of Books “Best of 2020” Selection
A New York Times Best Art Book of the Year
An Art Newspaper Book of the YearA powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system.
More than two million people are currentl...
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The Origin of Others
Toni Morrison
America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?
Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morris...
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The Color of Money
Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
Mehrsa Baradaran
“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates“A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.”
—The Atlantic“Extraordinary…Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out...
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The Condemnation of Blackness
Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, With a New Preface
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year“A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”
—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of BooksHow did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemna...
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