biography black studies

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth, 262 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Clean, tight copy. This portrait of Disderi and the carte de visite he patented in Paris in 1854 is far more than a biography. The c-d-v, or photographic calling card, was a relatively inexpensive product that made the photographic portrait available to the middle class . McCauley's carefully documented work explores Disderi's career and oeuvre , the impact of mass-produced celebrity cartes on the social and cultural life of mid-19th-century France, and aesthetics in c-d-v portraiture. The final third of the book is an art historical evaluation of the importance of the c-d-v for portrait painting of the period . The fine bibliography, generous illustrative matter, and detailed notes add to the value of this work for the avid student of photohistory or 19th-century studies.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with edge wear, short closed tears. The first full-length biography--and likely the authoritative one for years to come--of the flamboyant black congressman who, as civil-rights gadfly and as libertine, exemplified the gap between our nation's ideals and practices that was given a name in Gunnar Myrdal's ``American Dilemma.'' Blessed with good looks, eloquence, and a bully pulpit (he succeeded his father as head of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the nation's largest black congregation), Powell became ``Mr. Civil Rights'' in the pre-King era by combining agitation and electoral politics. As congressman from Harlem, Powell denounced racist southern colleagues and introduced the ``Powell Amendment'' to deny federal funds to projects or organizations that practiced discrimination. In 1960, he became chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, then the strongest position ever held by a black in the US government. Columbia Univ. political-science professor Hamilton also highlights how the Democratic politician became a thorn in the side of ally and foe alike. Powell was a maverick seldom bound by party (he endorsed Eisenhower for President), duty (a high absentee rate), or conventional morality. Inevitably, after an income-tax evasion trial, a suit filed by a Harlem resident he called a ``bag woman,'' and a European junket with two attractive female aides, Powell was stripped of his chairmanship by the House of Representatives despite his cry of double standards for white counterparts. Blending scholarship and ironic detachment, an admirably balanced treatment of a politician who provoked anything but objectivity during his Marion Barry-like career.

Hardcover. Minneapolis, MN, North Loop Books, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 292 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Color and black and white pictures throughout.

Softcover. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2nd pr., 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 266 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY KELLEY on the title page. Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813-1884) was a prominent African American businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion, and collaborator of the state's abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In his biography of this remarkable woman, Mark Kelley reveals how Smith served the cause of abolition, managed Stevens's household, acquired property, and crossed racialized social boundaries. In the last years of Stevens's life, as his declining health threatened to short-circuit his work, Smith risked her own well-being to keep him alive while he led the drive to end slavery, impeach Andrew Johnson, and push for the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Skira Rizzoli, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom of the text block. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Large black & white and color photographs throughout. Tight copy. Many portraits ranging throughout Audrey's life.

Hardcover. NY, Bantam Books, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 414 pages, b&w photos. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 216 pages. Hardcover with price-clipped dust jacket. Dust jacket shows chipping, and wear on edges. Covered with plastic sleeve. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf,otherwise clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Rizzoli, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 256 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, like new copy, still in publishers shrink wrap, although has a slight tear in shrink wrap on bottom edge. Remainder mark on bottom edge of text block. Otherwise tight copy. Color and black & white photographs throughout. International supermodel Cindy Crawford presents her own personal visual autobiography, the first book to chronicle her life and career, featuring some of her most memorable images.

Hardcover. Guilford, CT, Lyons Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 144 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Hundreds of never before seen black & white photographs and private letters spanning 1949 - 2000.

Softcover. Norman OK, University of Oklahoma Press, reprint, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 207 pages, b&w illustrations. Few of rodeo's early heroes matched the achievements of the black cowboy Bill Pickett, and his story is recounted here for the first time in book form. Pickett grew up in Texas in the 1880s, the child of former slaves, to become nationally famous as the star of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show. Pickett was associated with such western figures as Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Milt Hinkle, and Lucille Mulhall, and earned a reputation as an all around cowboy of legendary abilities. His greatest claim to fame is as the originator of steer wrestling, the only rodeo event to the traced to one individual. Audiences all over the United States, South America, Canada, and England were amazed to see the "Dusky Demon" fell on thousand-pound steers and bring them down bite-'em style with his teeth. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Columbia, SC, State Company, 2nd, 1922, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 345 pages. Hardcover with black stamped lettering on front. Rear top corner bumped. Light foxing on page block and internal pages. Light fading on edges of cover.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 237 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Memoir of an African-American woman when she was a student at a formerly all white male private prep school.

Hardcover. Brooklyn, NY, PowerHouse Books, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 200 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom edge, otherwise, clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Color and Black and white pictures throughout. Explores the genre of self-portraits through nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century photographic techniques, including also block prints, watercolor drawings, and accompanying essays.

Hardcover. US, Atlas & Co, 6th, 2008, 240 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2nd pr., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Blending biography and social history, this portrait of one of the first Black Americans to win fame and respect in the twentieth century draws on new interview material and translations from German press coverage. 330 pages, b&w illustrations.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would "invigorate" the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America's race problems. Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. Philippa grew up under the adoring andinquisitive eyes of an entire nation and soon became the role model and inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the "little Harlem genius." Suffering the double sting of racismand gender bias, Philippa had been rejected by the elite classical music milieu in the United States and forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a world-class performer and composer. She traveled throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia performing for kings, queens, and presidents. By then Philippa had added a second career as an author and foreign correspondent reporting on events around the globe--from Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lamberene to the turbulent Asian theater of the 1960s. She would give a command performance for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium one day, and hide from the Viet Cong among the ancient graves of the Annam kings another.

Softcover. Urbana IL, University of Illinois Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 295 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY BECK on the title page. A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life. In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 768 pages. One of the most influential singers and songwriters of all time, Sam Cooke was among the first to blend gospel music and secular themes--the early foundation of soul music. He was the opposite of Elvis: a black performer who appealed to white audiences, who wrote his own songs, who controlled his own business destiny. No biography has previously been written that fully captures Sam Cooke's accomplishments, the importance of his contribution to American music, the drama that accompanied his rise in the early days of the civil rights movement, and the mystery that surrounds his death. Bestselling author Peter Guralnick tells this moving and significant story, from Cooke's childhood as a choirboy to an adulthood when he was anything but. With appearances by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, Aretha Franklin, Fidel Castro, The Beatles, Sonny and Cher, Bob Dylan, and other central figures of this explosive era, DREAM BOOGIE is a compelling depiction of one man striving to achieve his vision despite all obstacles--and an epic portrait of America during the turbulent and hopeful 1950s and 1960s. The triumph of the book is the vividness with which Peter Guralnick conveys the astonishing richness of the black America of this era--the drama, force, and feeling of the story.

Hardcover. Jefferson NC, McFarland, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 223 pages, b&w photos. Eugene Jackson became a child star in 1924 playing "Pineapple" in the original "Our Gang" comedy shorts. Join him as he shares his life story -- a story that preserves the history of vaudeville and early Hollywood as well as chronicles the African American experience in the entertainment business.

Hardcover. NY, STEWART TABORI CHANG, 1ST, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 378 pages. Here is a musical history told in legends, facts, and rumors every bit as colorful as the images that illustrate the book. The story is filled with characters such as O.V. Wright, a singer deemed "too ugly to tour"; Frnakie Lymon, who received a hot dog as full payment for some of the greatest R&B songs of all time; LaVern Baker, a.k.a. "Little Miss Sharecropper"; Bille Holiday shooting dice with the boys on the bus; Solomon Burke, R&B immortal and Doctor of Mortuary Sciences; soul ghoul Screamin' Jay Hawkins locked in his coffin by the Drifters; and many otehr talented and unique entertainers. Illustrated with more than 400 original photographs, publicity shots, posters, programs, advertisements, program covers, magazine covers, album covers and sleeves, sheet music, and record labels in full color, this is a story of hot music and high style, of people who made history by being themselves and made the world a richer, wilder and definitely cooler place for the rest of us.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 168 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Color and black & white images throughout. Tight copy. Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power traces the path of this remarkable early feminist and visionary art patron. In Rubinstein's world, art and commerce blended seamlessly. She ornamented her salons and homes with splendid artworks--Surrealist murals, modernist portraits, Art Deco furniture, Venetian mirrors, and one of the era's great collections of African and Oceanic art. Her understanding of beauty was similarly expansive and democratic: she saw the face as the site for self-expression and the exploration of identity. The Rubinstein beauty program thus included not only makeup and hairdressing, but also lessons in health, deportment, and culture. Such features, innovative at the time and wildly popular, today provide a fascinating glimpse into popular culture as it affected women in the 20th century.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 168 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Color and black & white images throughout. Tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 254, b&w illustrations. A veteran of seven decades of professional baseball reminisces about his days in the Negro Leagues, offers an intimate portrait of Satchel Paige, and reveals his current work scouting for the Kansas City Royals at age eighty-two. Buck O'Neil was a former all-star player and manager for the Kansas City Monarchs; he also has the distinction of being the first black to hold a coaching position in major league baseball. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 192 pages. Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. Black jockeys were internationally famous - the first African American superstar athletes--and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all. At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy's troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. Clean copy.