"In 2005, a group of construction workers in Jerusalem made an incredible discovery. Underneath the parking lot they were digging up lay an ancient city that was built in the tenth century! Three years later, gold coins from an even earlier century were found at the site. The city of Jerusalem is like a layer cake of history-more than five thousand years of complicated history-all of which author Ellen Morgan explains clearly and objectively in this...

"Ten years ago, Sylvia Gray's young daughter, Faye, attacked a classmate in order to impress the Kingman, a monster she and her best friend had encountered on the Internet. When twenty-one-year-old Faye goes missing, leaving her toddler behind, Sylvia launches a search that propels her back into the past and back into the Kingman's orbit. With the help of her estranged husband, her distant sister, and a charismatic professor, Sylvia draws dangerously...

"On the edge of the vast continent the English called Virginia, in a forelorn settlement named Jamestown, America's Christmas celebration began to take shape. For two centuries, Christmas was largely a Virginia phenomenon. The holiday did not even exist in England but in colonial Virginia, Christmas meant a fornight of festivities; lavish feasts, prodigous drinking, fox hunts, dancing, games, music and decorated churches and homes. In the 19th century,...

It's 16-year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother's dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged...

"Fresh out of prison for an arson conviction, clueless 20-year old Billy Bonney finds himself drifting through the seedy and unsavory world of cut-rate moviemaking, even more out of place amongst his peers than he felt as a teen six years earlier when he got busted. Following his brother to the sets of grade B and exploitation 1970s Hollywood seems like a path of least resistance, until he accidentally lands a job as a handler to a has-been actor....

1921, Chicago. Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the "wealthiest Negro in America," whose affluence catapulted his family to the heights of Black society. After the unexpected death of her only brother, Nelly becomes the premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations beyond society influence and marriage. For the past year, she has worked undercover as an investigative journalist, sharing the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people...

Ex-lovers reunite when they both become stranded in an airport overnight. They find themselves drawn together to revisit their past to discuss what could have been and what may happen in the future.

"The first major monograph on Simone Leigh's multimedia explorations of community, Black feminism and the traditions and material cultures of the African diaspora. Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh has created artwork that situates questions of Black femme-identified subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Her sculpture, video, installation and social practice explore ideas of race, beauty and community in visual and material...

"Over the past half-century, Americans have watched their country extend its military power to what seemed the very ends of the earth. America’s might is felt on nearly every continent―and even on its own streets. Decades ago, the Wars on Drugs and Terror broke down the walls separating law enforcement from military operations. A World of Enemies tells the story of how an America plagued by fears of waning power and influence embraced foreign...

"For most of the 2,000-plus years since its foundation as a discipline by ancient Greek thinkers, rhetoric-the art of using language to persuade-was a keystone of a Western education. But in the early 20th century, studying rhetoric fell out of fashion. In The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself, Robin Reames, one of the world's leading scholars of rhetoric, argues that it's high time to bring it back. Drawing on examples ranging from the Sophist...