Social Science : African-American Studies

While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative—from slavery to freedom and literacy—that emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery. more...

Price: $60.00

Gullah-an African English hybrid language-has been spoken by people of African descent in the U.S. for 400 years, and is growing in its social, cultural, and historical influence. more...

Price: $54.95

Every schoolchild knows of Harriet Tubman's heroic escape and resistance to slavery. But few readers are aware that Tubman went on to be a scout, a spy, and a nurse for the Union Army, because there has never before been a serious biography for an adult audience of this important woman. This is that long overdue historical work, written by an acclaimed historian of the antebellum era and the Civil War. more...

Price: $10.95

As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Veve Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Genevieve Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.  more...

Price: $72.00

It was a crumbling city, like so many others. But in Hartford five gifted young men, who met as high school athletes, promised their lives to the hometown that shaped them even as it was coming apart. They intended to go far. They would, they pledged, bring back college degrees and commit themselves to living and working in Hartford. more...

Price: $19.95