Category: Books

  • “Divine Variations” offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference.

  • A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, ‘Such a Fun Age’ is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

  • In this extraordinary novel based on his own father’s fate, Anyuru evokes P’s struggles in gorgeous, vivid prose. As a refugee, as a military-camp prisoner, and as an exile, P never gives up hope and continues to dream of a life as a pilot.

  • In this extraordinary and inspiring debut memoir, Jesse Thistle, once a high school dropout and now a rising Indigenous scholar, chronicles his life on the streets and how he overcame trauma and addiction to discover the truth about who he is.

  • In “Beyond the Sunset,” Wayne Winkler uses contemporary press reports, long-forgotten documents, and interviews with participants to chronicle the struggles of an impoverished rural Appalachian county to maintain its viability in the modern world–and the unexpected consequences of that effort.

  • “Walking toward the Sunset” is a historical examination of the Melungeons, a mixed-race group predominantly in southern Appalachia.

  • Shape Shifters: Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity University of Nebraska Press January 2020 432 pages 8 photos, index Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4962-0663-3 eBook (EPUB) ISBN: 978-1-4962-1698-4 eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-4962-1700-4 Edited by: Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, Curator of History Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, California Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Professor of History University of…

  • For more than a century, skin lighteners have been an ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In “Beneath the Surface,” Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond.

  • “Distorted Descent” examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined “Indigenous” identity.

  • Following her National Book Award– nominated debut novel, “A Kind of Freedom,” Margaret Wilkerson Sexton returns with this equally elegant and historically inspired story of survivors and healers, of black women and their black sons, set in the American South