Henry Louis Gates
Renowned scholar and New York Times bestselling author Gates delivers a stirring and authoritative companion to the major new PBS documentary America Behind the Color Line. The book includes thought-provoking essays from Colin Powell,...
Winner • NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction)
Winner • Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award
Holiday Gift Guide Selection • Indiewire, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune
These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.
Drawing from the great folklorists
...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, author of The History of White People
"A
#1 Bestseller
Now a major motion picture directed by Steve McQueen and starring Brad Pitt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Paul Giamatti
12 Years a Slave is a riveting true account of a free man captured and sold into slavery in the pre–Civil War South. Solomon Northup's narrative explores one of the darkest times in American history and captures in vivid detail the unimaginable
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