This daring collaborative effort showcases dialogues between international scholars engaged with the United States from abroad. The writers investigate the analytic methods and choices that label certain talk, images, behaviors, and allusions as "American" and how to read the data on such material. The editors present the essays in pairs that overlap in theme or region. Each author subsequently comments on the other's work. A third scholar or team of scholars from a different discipline or...

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, “Congo Love Song” emerges a...

An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materialsThe preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838, how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and driver, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew into a man w...

**From the pre-eminent scholar of foreign policy, the classic work that defined soft power“As brilliant as it is timely, Professor Nye’s book is must reading for anyone who cares about the success of America and the world.” —Madeleine K. Albright**Joseph S. Nye, Jr., coined the term “soft power” to describe a nation’s ability to attract and persuade. Whereas hard power—the ability to coerce—grows out of a country’s military or economic might, soft power arises from the attr...

"[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes" ( Vice).A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unima...

From the end of postwar Reconstruction in the South to an analysis of the rise and fall of Black Power, acclaimed historian Adam Fairclough presents a straightforward synthesis of the century-long struggle of black Americans to achieve civil rights and equality in the United States. Beginning with Ida B. Wells and the campaign against lynching in the 1890s, Fairclough chronicles the tradition of protest that led to the formation of the NAACP, Booker T. Washington and the strategy of accomm...

First published in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is a landmark autobiography and one of the most influential works in American literature. In this compelling firsthand account, Frederick Douglass recounts his experiences in slavery, the brutality he endured, and his courageous journey toward freedom. With powerful prose and moral clarity, Douglass exposes the inhumanity of slavery while highlighting the transformative power of education, resistance, a...

Geopolitics is a way of looking at the world: one that considers the links between political power, geography, and cultural diversity. In certain places such as Iraq or Lebanon, moving a few feet either side of a territorial boundary can be a matter of life or death, dramatically highlighting the connections between place and politics. Even far away from these 'danger zones' - in Europe or the US for example - geopolitics remains an important part of everyday life. For a country's location an...

The Black History of the White House presents the untold history, racial politics, and shifting significance of the White House as experienced by African Americans, from the generations of enslaved people who helped to build it or were forced to work there to its first black First Family, the Obamas.Clarence Lusane juxtaposes significant events in White House history with the ongoing struggle for democratic, civil, and human rights by black Americans and d...

Ellen Craft and William Craft were slaves from Georgia who escaped to the North in 1848. They became famous due to the daring way they made their escape. Ellen, being light skinned, passed herself off as a white male, with William as her servant, allowing them to basically travel openly by train and steamboat. They eventually emigrated to England where they lived for almost 20 years. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is their biographical account.

Billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilisation. So why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressing world poverty and environmental crisis? In this take-no-prisoners analysis, Slavoj Zizek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century. What he finds is the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the right hook o...

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys t...