africa history

Hardcover. NY, Dodd Mead, 3rd pr., 1943, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bright red cloth stamped in black. Endpapers map, b&w photographs. 410 pages. The widow of Carl Akeley, naturalist, tells the story back of the exhibits for which he was responsible in the Natural History Museum in New York. This is virtually a biography, with that as a focus; it is a record of the uphill struggle to get the chance to do the thing for which he was gifted and trained; the experiences securing his speciments, adventures in the wilderness, African jungles, the Belgian Congo, the Uganda frontier -- and the immense concentration on details to get the exhibits together and to present them with complete fidelity. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 530 pages, b&w illustrations. The dramatic story of W. E. B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I-and a new understanding of one of the great twentieth-century writers. When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In The Wounded World, Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century. Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois's unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois's largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today. Remainder mark on top edhge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott , 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale green cloth, 210 pages. Great Battles Series. No dust jacket. Related clipping laid in. Mild fading to gilt lettering on spine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 430 pages. During America's Swing Era, no musician was more successful or controversial than Artie Shaw: the charismatic and opinionated clarinetist-bandleader whose dozens of hits became anthems for "the greatest generation." But some of his most beautiful recordings were not issued until decades after he'd left the scene. He broke racial barriers by hiring African-American musicians. His frequent "retirements" earned him a reputation as the Hamlet of jazz. And he quit playing for good at the height of his powers. The handsome Shaw had seven wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner). Inveterate reader and author of three books, he befriended the best-known writers of his time. Tom Nolan, who interviewed Shaw between 1990 and his death in 2004 and spoke with one hundred of his colleagues and contemporaries, captures Shaw and his era with candour and sympathy, bringing the master to vivid life and restoring him to his rightful place in jazz history. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Washington DC, Giles, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. Beautiful and poignant photographs by African American and other photographers (selected from the large and growing photography collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), accompanied by three short, insightful essays, reveal the rich and significant contributions African Americans have made to to our great American heritage.

Softcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, reprint, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 469 pages."One of the first histories to treat non-whites as active self conscious protagonists in twentieth-century South African affairs rather than as a dark acquiescent host before which the really important story of white South Africa unfolds. The new edition has been corrected and eight new chapters extend the coverage to the end of 1963. It is an important addition to the literature about South Africa."--The Historian. C;ean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 336 pages, b&w illustrations. Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 311 pages. As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta-the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south-in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 4th pr., 2000, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 670 pages, b&w illustrations. Written by the most prominent of the new generation of historians, this superb volume offers the most up-to-date and authoritative account available of African-American history, ranging from the first Africans brought as slaves into the Americas, to today's black filmmakers and politicians. Here is a panoramic view of African American life, rich in gripping first-person accounts and short character sketches that invite readers to relive history as African Americans experienced it. We begin in Africa, with the growth of the slave trade, and follow the forced migration of what is estimated to be between ten and twenty million people, witnessing the terrible human cost of slavery in the colonies of England and Spain. We read of the Haitian Revolution, which ended victoriously in 1804 with the birth of the first independent black nation in the New World, and of slave rebellions and resistance in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. There are vivid accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the backlash of notorious "Jim Crow" laws and mob lynchings, and the founding of key black educational institutions. The contributors also trace the migration of blacks to the major cities, the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the hardships of the Great Depression and the service of African Americans in World War II, the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and '60s, and the emergence of today's black middle class. From Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Louis Farrakhan, To Make Our World Anew is an unforgettable portrait of a people. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Penguin Books, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 226 pages, profusely illustrated in b&w. This book presents not only formal or professionally taken photos but also a fair amount of ordinary photos taken by soldiers and civilians. The history of the personal camera is tied up into the Boer War and the quality and candid nature of some of the photos are representatives of early personal use. A general pictorial overview of an ugly conflict in the waning days before WW1. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York , Viking Press , 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 260 pages, b&w illustrations. Light edgewear to dust jacket with creases to both front and rear flap. Internally very good.

Hardcover. London, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 403 pages, 2 maps. In the belief that intensive study of selected local areas is an important development in scholarship on Africa, the author presents a micropolitical study of an important region of one of East Africa's Rew nations. Sukumaland, an area of Tanzania which contains one tenth of the country's population and its largest tribe, was chosen for the study. Before independence it exhibited the most organized nationalist political activity of any part of the country and developed the largest African-owned co-operative movement in all of Africa. In the final decade of the colonial era Sukumaland was the British administration's principal experimental area for attempts at radical transformation of indigenous political institutions and traditional agricultural techniques. After independence it became a critical testing ground for President Julius Nyerere's concepts of African socialism. Owner's signature on the front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, The Folio Society, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth boards, gilt titles, pictorial pastedown on cover. Maroon card slipcase is a little faded at entrance. 203 pages with endpaper maps plus 16 plates from photographs. A legendary explorer's own account of his expedition up the Gambia river originally published in 1799, here with the text of the 1860 edition with new opening and closing material by John Keay. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Detailed analysis of the events surrounding independence by former British ambassador. 138 pages plus index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Potomac Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 270 pages, b&w illustrations. As the first great Jewish player in the major leagues and the first African American to play major-league baseball during the twentieth century, respectively, Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson are forever linked because of the barriers they encountered, the discrimination they endured, the athletic gifts they exhibited, and especially the courage and dignity they displayed. Both suffered ridicule and abuse as they participated in the national pastime. Nevertheless, each excelled. Greenberg became one of the preeminent sluggers of the 1930s and 1940s who took a break from baseball to serve in the war. Robinson, from the mid-1940s into the following decade, helped bring back speed and a thinking man's approach to the game, both of which had largely been discarded for a generation. Two Pioneers presents these remarkable players' experiences while competing in a nation that was deeply divided on social issues such as anti-Semitism and racism. Both men earned nearly as much attention off the field as they did on it. Greenberg called into question the idea of a "master race" as Adolf Hitler rose to power and gained supporters all over the world. Likewise, Robinson contested racial notions regarding the supposed inferiority of people of African ancestry, even though segregationists proved determined to maintain social barriers separating blacks and whites. It is only fitting that when Robinson finally crossed baseball's color line, Greenberg was one of the first players to welcome him publicly. Robert Cottrell's well-researched work shows how two baseball superstars became important figures in the civil rights crusade to ensure that all Americans, no matter their religion or race, are given equal opportunity. Clean, bright copy.

NY, US Camera Publishing, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover with a bright dust jacket, 424 pages. Catagories of photos include post-war European photography, the year's best pictures American-International, Elisofon's Africa-in color, combat in Korea, The News in Pictures. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hartford, Canfield and Robins, 1st, 1836, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, 610 pages. Hardcover with brown leather covers. Heavy soil and wear to the leather. Moderate foxing throughout. Black and white illustrations/engraved plates. Iceland to New Zealand, including the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Water stain to first 40 pages, about one sixth of page. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Sound binding.

Hardcover. NY, Atria Books, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 368 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. The definitive biography that unlocks the remarkable story of Vivian Maier, the nanny who lived secretly as a world-class photographer, featuring nearly 400 of her images, many never seen before, placed for the first time in the context of her life. Vivian Maier, the photographer nanny whose work was famously discovered in a Chicago storage locker, captured the imagination of the world with her masterful images and mysterious life. Before posthumously skyrocketing to global fame, she had so deeply buried her past that even the families she lived with knew little about her. No one could relay where she was born or raised, if she had parents or siblings, if she enjoyed personal relationships, why she took photographs and why she didn't share them with others. Now, in this definitive biography, Ann Marks uses her complete access to Vivian's personal records and archive of 140,000 photographs to reveal the full story of her extraordinary life. Based on meticulous investigative research, Vivian Maier Developed reveals the story of a woman who fled from a family with a hidden history of illegitimacy, bigamy, parental rejection, substance abuse, violence, and mental illness to live life on her own terms. Left with a limited ability to disclose feelings and form relationships, she expressed herself through photography, creating a secret portfolio of pictures teeming with emotion, authenticity, and humanity. With limitless resilience she knocked down every obstacle in her way, determined to improve her lot in life and that of others by tirelessly advocating for the rights of workers, women, African Americans, and Native Americans. No one knew that behind the detached veneer was a profoundly intelligent, empathetic, and inspired woman--a woman so creatively gifted that her body of work would become one of the greatest photographic discoveries of the century.

Hardcover. Stanford CA, Hoover Institution Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 280 pages, b&w illustrations, endpapers map. A study of the development of the trade union movement in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) after the Second World War, which places them in the context of wider social and industrial change in the country. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Palgrave Macmillan, reprint, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 270 pages, b&w illustrations. The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette. Clean copy.

Art Intitute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial cloth, 251 pages illustrated in color. The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawings Much of Joseph Elmer Yoakum's story comes from the artist himself--and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891-1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a "spiritual unfoldment"? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities. With hundreds of beautiful color reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist's work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography. Clean copy. NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. London, Quiller Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 432 pages. Profusely illustrated in color and b&w, folding map in rear pocket. The story of Lake Rudolph/Turkana, and its exploration by numerous expeditions of explorers from the earliest days. The author has spent his life in Kenya and roamed the Northern Frontier District for over 35 years. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Dennis Dobson Limited, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 111 pages, b&w illustrations. Colin Wills writes with the cool objectiveness of one who is not personally involved in the struggle, and the result is a book which searched deep and yielded information not be found elsewhere at the time. It does not merely deal with Mau Mau, but with the whole problem of Kenya, which in turn was the problem of all Africa - that of race relations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 426 pages, illustrations. From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans. By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state-and the South--white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny. In 1898, in response to a speech calling for white men to rise to the defense of Southern womanhood against the supposed threat of black predators, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young Record editor, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly. Clean copy.