Black Studies

Softcover. Syracuse, NY, Willis N Bugbee Co, 1st, 1932, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 16 pages. Softcover booklet. Green paper wrappers with softened edges. Light soil to paper wrappers. tight copy. Lightly faded on rear.

New York, John S. Taylor, 1st, 1836, Book: Good, Hardcover, 296 pages plus 8 pages of publisher's ads in rear. Original black boards with embossed design, gilt lettering and design with number ! on spine. Folding chart/map tipped in at page 196 with short tears. Illustrated title page. The first of three anti-slavery books published by John Taylor, a staunch abolitionist. A few brief notations on prlim pages, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, Harper Perennial, reprint, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 617 pages. Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Wright, and more than fifty other important Black authors record the experiences of African Americans from the reconstruction to the present and demonstrate the evolution of the American short story form. Clean copy.

softcover. New York, Theatre Communications Group, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 127 pages. Softcover. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers.

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.

Philadelphia , John Winston, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. B&W illustrations by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge. Clean copy in a nice dust jacket, pages tanning. Caleb Willows, a 16-year-old slave, makes a break for freedom and later is a student at Fisk University in Tennessee. He becomes one of the Jubilee Singers, eleven young African Americans who tour the United States and England singing spirituals in order to raise money for the school.

Softcover. San Francisco, Backbeat Books, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 271 pages, b&w illustrations. Chasin' That Devil Music has the feel of a documentary about the making of a thrilling motion picture. The main focus is on the Delta blues singers of the early 20th century--artists such as Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Son House, and Blind Lemon Jefferson who've achieved near-mythic status in blues circles. In addition, many of the articles gathered in this splendidly illustrated volume capture the process and people involved in tracking long-lost recordings nearly as elusive as the performers who made them. Here, for example, is the story of author/blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow's three-year hunt for the death certificate of Robert Johnson, the celebrated Mississippi bluesman and a figure whose legend has grown greater with each year since his much-debated death in 1938. The text here is nearly as raw in spots as the music that sparked it, but, as with those sounds (which can be heard on a terrific CD sampler included with the book), enthusiasts will find Chasin' That Devil Music riveting. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, black cloth stamped with silver lettering in a bright dust jacket, 112 pages. An immensely important record of black life in Chicago at the near end of the 1940's. Apart from a few photos of entertainers the rest capture, in fascinating detail, life in Chicago's south side. The workplace and workers, interiors of homes and bars, parades, funerals, sport and street scenes with plenty of activity. The detail in all these pictures is impressive and typical of Miller's eye to capture a scene that reveals so much. Foreword by Orville Schell. commentaries by Gordon Parks and Robert Stepto. Small color sticker on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, Schiffer, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Color photographs throughout. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 274 pages. Covers political and economic developments, particularly those involving unions and employment, from 1777 to 1965. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, McGraw Hill, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 171 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with art by Charles Lilly.

Softcover. London, Merrell Publishers, 1st pbk, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages, mostly b&w photos, some color. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Feb. 16 - Apr. 29, 2001. The 94 African American photographers whose works appear in this volume, have used their equipment as tools of social commentary and personal and artistic exploration, bearing witness to the changes in American society over the past 50 years. Clean copy.

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.

Hardcover. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, black cloth stamped in gilt, 204 pages. Dust jacket with partial fading, edgewear. Clean copy. The author's last work, a study of the Dahomean Kingdom, it's history and the part gold, colonialism and the slave trade played in it's fortunes. Scarce title.

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.

Softcover. NY, Praeger, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 189 pages, b&w illustrations. This ground-breaking work brings dance into current discussions of the African presence in American culture. Dixon Gottschild argues that the Africanist aesthetic has been invisibilized by the pervasive force of racism. This book provides evidence to correct and balance the record, investigating the Africanist presence as a conditioning factor in shaping American performance, onstage and in everyday life. She examines the Africanist presence in American dance forms particularly in George Balanchine's Americanized style of ballet, (post)modern dance, and blackface minstrelsy. Hip hop culture and rap are related to contemporary performance, showing how a disenfranchised culture affects the culture in power. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Hyperion Books for Children, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Unpaginated. Hardcover with matching dust jacket. SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR ON FRONT FLY LEAF. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Detroit MI, Broadside Press, 7th pr., 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 64 pages. Introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. St. Paul MN, Minnesota Historical Society, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. 143 pages, b&w photos throughout. After serving in World War II, John Glanton returned home to Minnesota and began taking his camera around the streets, parks, clubs, restaurants, and private homes of Minneapolis, capturing the sights and scenes of everyday life for African Americans in the city. The images--from intimate portraits to public gatherings--reveal a dynamic and diverse community at a time when the nation was entering the postwar boom but before the civil rights movement had taken root. Glanton's photos offer a rare look into the lives and lifestyles of families and individuals often left out of histories of Minnesota's past, showing people at work and play, young and old, happy and sad. The images highlight black-owned businesses of the day, the music and club scene, and weddings and other family occasions to depict the experiences of African American people as presented through the lens of an African American photographer. Long forgotten in the garage of a family member, the photo negatives were recently rediscovered and digitized. A selection of 200 of the more than 800 images are featured here, along with commentary that further illuminates the lives and experiences of African Americans in postwar Minnesota.

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.

Softcover. Minneapolis MN, University Of Minnesota Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 312 pages. Collins looked at the role of African American women in the feminist movement. Here she focuses on the prejudices they face. Collins discusses the culture of silence in which African American women are seen but not heard, making them outsiders within their own race. She notes that their accomplishments are often ignored, especially when the women transcend expectations. She points to Mary McLeod Bethune, whose role in FDR's administration is often overlooked, and Angela Davis, who found that her Civil Rights work boiled down to her Afro hairdo. Collins discusses the need for African American women to avoid being segmented into areas the present culture finds acceptable. Clean copy.

Softcover. Charleston, SC, Arcadia Publishing, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 128 pages, b&w photos throughout. At the foot of the Huachuca Mountains, the U.S. Army founded one of the most crucial military posts for American expansion into the southwest frontier. Soldiers had been stationed in the region for decades, but in 1877 Fort Huachuca became the symbolic cornerstone of America's western domain. The Native American word huachuca, meaning "place of thunder," described the sporadic but marvelous electrical storms in the area, but the skies would not be the only thing booming. During the tumultuous campaigns to resolve American and Indian disputes, the U.S. infantry and famed Buffalo Soldiers faced off with Geronimo and his Apache nation in both tense negotiations and bitter combat. As time marched on, the fort developed into a permanent installation with barracks, modern training grounds, and other facilities to accommodate troop rotations and eventually became the innovative Center for Military Intelligence. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 402 pages, b&w illustrations. An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. Ingrid Monson illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Clean copy.