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Gift Guide--Biography/History

New biographies and history

Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement By Tanisha Ford Cover Image
$32.99
ISBN: 9780063115712
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Published: Amistad - October 24th, 2023

An engrossing social history of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the glittering "Beaux Arts Ball,” the social event of New York and Harlem society for fifty years—a glamorous event rivalling today’s Met Gala, drawing America’s wealthy and cultured, both Black and whit


An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning History) By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Cover Image
$28.95
ISBN: 9780807013076
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Published: Beacon Press - October 3rd, 2023

New York Times Bestseller

This American Book Award winning title about Native American struggle and resistance radically reframes more than 400 years of US history

 


To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul By Tracy K. Smith Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780593534762
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Published: Knopf - November 7th, 2023

ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might—together—come to a new view of our shared past


Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History By Nur Masalha Cover Image
$16.95
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ISBN: 9780755649426
Published: I. B. Tauris & Company - October 5th, 2023

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America By Michael Harriot Cover Image
$32.50
ISBN: 9780358439165
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Published: Dey Street Books - September 19th, 2023

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans.


Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class By Blair LM Kelley, Ph. D. Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9781631496554
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Published: Liveright - June 13th, 2023

An award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears.


American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life By Jennifer Lunden Cover Image
$32.00
ISBN: 9780062941374
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Published: Harper - May 9th, 2023

A Silent Spring for the human body, this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves the author’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.


Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt By Orisanmi Burton Cover Image
$29.95
ISBN: 9780520396326
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Published: University of California Press - October 31st, 2023

A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons.
 
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders.


Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America By Heather Cox Richardson Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780593652961
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Published: Viking - September 26th, 2023

New York Times Bestseller

“Engaging and highly accessible.”—Boston Globe

“A vibrant, and essential history of America's unending, enraging and utterly compelling struggle since its founding to live up to its own best ideals… It's both a cause for hope, and a call to arms.”--Jane Mayer, author Dark Money


Dolly Parton: 100 Remarkable Moments in an Extraordinary Life By Tracey E. W. Laird Cover Image
$24.99
ISBN: 9780760382967
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Published: Epic Ink - October 24th, 2023

Explore 100 remarkable moments in the extraordinary life of Dolly Parton with this illustrated retrospective of her most amazing achievements.

Everyone’s favorite country music star and American icon, Dolly Parton, has accomplished incredible things in her life, from releasing the hit “I Will Always Love You” to creating a nonprofit for children.


For All Humankind: The Untold Stories of How the Moon Landing Inspired the World By Tanya Harrison, Danny Bednar, Ray Brisendine (Illustrator) Cover Image
$19.95
ISBN: 9781642500967
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Published: Tma Press - March 17th, 2020

Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin left humanity's first footprints on the Moon, July 20, 1969.

"A beautiful demonstration of how curiosity and wonder brought our planet together to accomplish the impossible." - Dagogo Altraide, creator of ColdFusion and author of New Thinking


The Deadline: Essays By Jill Lepore Cover Image
$45.00
ISBN: 9781631496127
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Published: Liveright - August 29th, 2023

"Jill Lepore is unquestionably one of America’s best historians; it’s fair to say she’s one of its best writers too." —Jonathan Russell Clark, Los Angeles Times

A TIME Best Book of the Year

A book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.


The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America By Katherine Turk Cover Image
$32.00
ISBN: 9780374601539
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Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - August 15th, 2023

"A clear blueprint for change . . . A must-read." —Clara Bingham, The Guardian

The history of NOW—its organization, trials, and revolutionary mission—told through the work of three members.


Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality By Tomiko Brown-Nagin Cover Image
$19.00
ISBN: 9780525436102
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Published: Vintage - March 7th, 2023

A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The first major biography of one of our most influential judges—an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary—that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century.


Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing Women Scientists Decoded the Hidden Universe By Shohini Ghose Cover Image
$29.95
ISBN: 9780262048316
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Published: The MIT Press - October 17th, 2023

An exciting new title in the vein of Hidden Figures, which tells the inspiring stories of long-overlooked women physicists and astronomers who discovered the fundamental rules of the universe and reshaped the rules of society.


Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence (Cultural Geographies + Rewriting the Earth) By Mark Griffiths (Editor), Mikko Joronen (Editor) Cover Image
By Mark Griffiths (Editor), Mikko Joronen (Editor)
$33.00
ISBN: 9781496237491
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Published: University of Nebraska Press - December 1st, 2023

Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel.


Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History By Emily Strasser Cover Image
$26.95
ISBN: 9780813197197
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Published: University Press of Kentucky - April 4th, 2023

The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire Before Stonewall (Gender and American Culture) By Cookie Woolner Cover Image
$27.45
ISBN: 9781469675480
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Published: University of North Carolina Press - September 12th, 2023

In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning By Grace Elizabeth Hale, John Grisham (Foreword by) Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9780316564748
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Published: Little, Brown and Company - November 7th, 2023

In this “courageous and compelling … essential and critically important” book (Bryan Stevenson), an award-winning scholar of white supremacy tackles her toughest research assignment yet: the unsolved murder of a Black man in rural Mississippi while her grandfather was the local sheriff—a cold case that sheds new light on the hidden legacy of racial terror in Americ


Asian American Histories of the United States (ReVisioning History #7) By Catherine Ceniza Choy Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9780807012710
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Published: Beacon Press - April 25th, 2023

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history


South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation By Imani Perry Cover Image
$19.99
ISBN: 9780062977373
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Published: Ecco - February 28th, 2023

WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER


The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison By Hugh Ryan Cover Image
$19.99
ISBN: 9781645036654
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Published: Bold Type Books - May 9th, 2023

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten.


Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self By Andrea Wulf Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9781984897992
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Published: Vintage - October 10th, 2023

A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of young rebels—poets, novelists, philosophers—who, through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heartbreaking grief, and radical ideas launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thi


Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America By Pekka Hämäläinen Cover Image
$22.00
ISBN: 9781324094067
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Published: Liveright - September 12th, 2023

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022
Best Books of 2022 — New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence


Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance By Mia Bay Cover Image
By Mia Bay
$19.95
ISBN: 9780674278622
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Published: Belknap Press - January 10th, 2023

Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the David J. Langum Prize
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award
Winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award
A New York Times Critics' Top Book of the Year


How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America By Clint Smith Cover Image
$18.99
ISBN: 9780316492928
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Published: Little, Brown and Company - December 27th, 2022

This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are ho


Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America By Saidiya Hartman, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Foreword by), Marisa J. Fuentes (Afterword by), Sarah Haley (Afterword by), Cameron Rowland (Notes by), Torkwase Dyson (By (artist)) Cover Image
By Saidiya Hartman, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Foreword by), Marisa J. Fuentes (Afterword by), Sarah Haley (Afterword by), Cameron Rowland (Notes by), Torkwase Dyson (By (artist))
$20.00
ISBN: 9781324021582
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Published: W. W. Norton & Company - October 25th, 2022

The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated.


An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (ReVisioning History #6) By Kyle T. Mays Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9780807006993
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Published: Beacon Press - November 15th, 2022

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America


G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner): J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century By Beverly Gage Cover Image
$25.00
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ISBN: 9780593511466
Published: Penguin Books - November 14th, 2023

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography


Not
$17.95
ISBN: 9780807055588
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Published: Beacon Press - August 23rd, 2022

Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States


Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature By Farah Jasmine Griffin Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781324022046
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Published: W. W. Norton & Company - August 2nd, 2022

A PBS NewsHour Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year in Nonfiction
Winner of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers.


Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 By Sarah Schulman Cover Image
$24.00
ISBN: 9781250849120
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Published: Picador - May 17th, 2022

Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary LGBTQ Nonfiction Award and the 2022 NLGJA Excellence in Book Writing Award.


The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation By Anna Malaika Tubbs Cover Image
$17.99
ISBN: 9781250756138
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Published: Flatiron Books - December 28th, 2021

New York Times Bestseller

“This dynamic blend of biography and manifesto centers on Louise Little, Alberta King, and Berdis Baldwin . . . Tubbs’s book stands against the women’s erasure, a monument to their historical importance.
The New Yorker