History

  • Feminism

    by Bernardine Evaristo

    $15.00

    Ships in 7-10 business days

    Feminism is a powerful new interpretation of British art from an intersectional feminist perspective, penned by one of Britain’s greatest writers

    “Art museums have long drawn me into their spaces. The infinite possibilities of the language of art opens me up to methods of communication quite unlike my own. I am fascinated by the most interesting and adventurous artists, who are surely among the most innovative thinkers on the planet. I am in awe of their talent and endless inventiveness, and my imagination is nourished by theirs. I am challenged to think differently about how we might understand, recreate, reshape, reimagine life itself—animate, inanimate, spirit. My senses are stimulated, my emotions stirred, my brain whirs away in the background and I feel very much alive. When I was invited to write this book, my first time writing about art, I immediately knew that I would turn my attention on women and womxn (to include non-binary people) of color in British art because, similar to the story throughout the arts, either as creator or curator, we haven’t been very visible. This book is personal—about the art I’ve seen, and the art I’ve loved—and my interpretation of the art in the national collection and beyond, from an intersectional feminist perspective.”

  • Children of Fire: A History of African Americans

    by Thomas C. Holt

    $30.00

     

    *ships in 7 - 10 business days*
    "The first survey of African American history to rival From Slavery to Freedom." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

     

    Ordinary people don't experience history as it is taught by historians. They live across the convenient chronological divides we impose on the past. The same people who lived through the Civil War and the eradication of slavery also dealt with the hardships of Reconstruction, so why do we almost always treat them separately? In this groundbreaking new book, renowned historian Thomas C. Holt challenges this form to tell the story of generations of African Americans through the lived experience of the subjects themselves, with all of the nuances, ironies, contradictions, and complexities one might expect.


  • Fear of a Black Republic : Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States
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    The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti’s place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the United States. As she shows, Haiti embodied what whites feared most: Black revolution and Black victory. Thus inspired, Black activists in the United States embraced a common identity with Haiti’s people, forging the idea of a united struggle that merged the destinies of Haiti with their own striving for freedom.

    A bold exploration of Black internationalism’s origins, Fear of a Black Republic links the Haitian revolution to the global Black pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

  • Singing Like Germans

    by Kira Thurman

    $32.95

    *ships in 7-10 business days

    In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. 

    Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall.

    Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it.

    Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.

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