Melba Patillo Beals was one of nine black teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas's Central High School in 1957. For Melba and her friends it marked their transformation into reluctant warriors—on a battlefield that helped shape the civil... [More...]

The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 blacks between 1882 and 1950. This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal... [More...]

The brutal conditions and inhuman treatment of African-Americans in Southern prisons has been immortalized in blues songs and in such movies as "Cool Hand Luke". Now, drawing on police and prison records and oral histories, David M. Oshinsky presents an... [More...]

A remarkable true story of heroism, courage, and faith

In a story of modern wars as told by the men who did the actual fighting, Hynes examines the journals, memoirs, and letters of men who fought in the two World Wars and in Vietnam, and also the wars fought against the weak and helpless in concentration... [More...]

The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer explores the ideals that shaped the lives of his forebears and describes his own struggle to carry on their tradition in our time, when large numbers of... [More...]

Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize


"An original, wise and courageous work that moves beyond sterile arguments and lifts the discussion of race and justice to a new and more hopeful level."--Arthur... [More...]

cent Speak Now Against the Day. His book is a stunning achievement: a sprawling, engrossing, deeply moving account of those Southerners, black and white, who raised their voices to challenge the South's racial mores. . . . (This) is an eloquent and... [More...]

"Powerful and poignant.... Newman's message is clear and timely." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

In No Shame in My Game, Harvard anthropologist Katherine Newman gives voice to a population for whom work, family, and self-esteem... [More...]

American Patriots is one of the great untold stories in American history. There have been books on individual black soldiers, but this is the first to tell the full story of the black American military experience, starting with the Revolution and... [More...]