"An incisive and illuminating analysis of the enduring legacy of the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction--a comprehensive story of Black Americans' struggle for human rights and dignity and the failure of the nation to fulfill its promises of freedom, citizenship, and justice"--

"In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language--including Rose's wish...

"Adolph L. Reed Jr.-- New Orleanian, political scientist, and, according to Cornel West, "the greatest democratic theorist of his generation"-- takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South"--

"Yuletide in Dixie scrutinizes two centuries of stereotypes about U.S. slaves' Christmases. Much has been written about Christmas in the antebellum South, but no book has tackled its place in master-slave relations, addressed black perspectives on holiday privileges, showed how these traditions disintegrated under the stress of the Civil War, or explained how antebellum Christmases were mythologized after the war--as they had been before it--in support...

"In White Fright, acclaimed historian Jane Dailey offers a radical reinterpretation of the fight for African American rights, showing how that fight has been closely bound, both in terms of law and in the white imagination, to the question of interracial sex and marriage. White fear of black sexuality not only fueled the systems of exclusion and oppression under Jim Crow, she contends it was also a central factor driving white resistance to the civil...

"Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips' characters like vultures and angels, as they...

One hundred years ago, a mysterious and alarming illness spread across America's South, striking tens of thousands of victims. No one knew what caused it or how to treat it. People were left weak, disfigured, insane, and in some cases, dead. Award winning science and history writer Gail Jarrow tracks this disease, commonly known as pellagra, and highlights how doctors, scientists, and public health officials finally defeated it. Illustrated with 100...