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  • 100 Years of Lynchings

     by Ralph Ginzburg

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    Paperback. Ginzburg compiles vivid newspaper accounts from 1886 to 1960 to provide insight and understanding of the history of racial violence.

  • Carefree Black Girls : A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture

    by Zeba Blay

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    *ships in 7- 10 business days*
    In 2013, film and culture critic Zeba Blay was one of the first people to coin the viral term #carefreeblackgirls on Twitter. As she says, it was “a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for Black women online.”

    In this collection of essays, Blay expands on this initial idea by delving into the work and lasting achievements of influential Black women in American culture--writers, artists, actresses, dancers, hip-hop stars--whose contributions often come in the face of bigotry, misogyny, and stereotypes. Blay celebrates the strength and fortitude of these Black women, while also examining the many stereotypes and rigid identities that have clung to them. In writing that is both luminous and sharp, expansive and intimate, Blay seeks a path forward to a culture and society in which Black women and their art are appreciated and celebrated.

  • Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race From 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.

    by Chancellor Williams

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    The Destruction of Black Civilization took Chancellor Williams sixteen years of research and field study to compile. The book, which was to serve as a reinterpretation of the history of the African race, was intended to be "a general rebellion against the subtle message from even the most 'liberal' white authors (and their Negro disciples): 'You belong to a race of nobodies. You have no worthwhile history to point to with pride.'" The book was written at a time when many black students, educators, and scholars were starting to piece together the connection between the way their history was taught and the way they were perceived by others and by themselves. They began to question assumptions made about their history and took it upon themselves to create a new body of historical research. The book is premised on the question: "If the Blacks were among the very first builders of civilization and their land the birthplace of civilization, what has happened to them that has left them since then, at the bottom of world society, precisely what happened? The Caucasian answer is simple and well-known: The Blacks have always been at the bottom." Williams instead contends that many elements--nature, imperialism, and stolen legacies-- have aided in the destruction of the black civilization.

    The Destruction of Black Civilization is revelatory and revolutionary because it offers a new approach to the research, teaching, and study of African history by shifting the main focus from the history of Arabs and Europeans in Africa to the Africans themselves, offering instead "a history of blacks that is a history of blacks. Because only from history can we learn what our strengths were and, especially, in what particular aspect we are weak and vulnerable. Our history can then become at once the foundation and guiding light for united efforts in serious[ly] planning what we should be about now." It was part of the evolution of the black revolution that took place in the 1970s, as the focus shifted from politics to matters of the mind.

  • This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

    by Charles E. Cobb Jr

    $25.95

    Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama, home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Charles E. Cobb Jr. recovers this history, describing the vital role that armed self-defense has played in the survival and liberation of black communities.  Drawing on his experiences in the civil rights movement and giving voice to its participants, Cobb lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the long history and importance of African Americans taking up arms to defend themselves against white supremacist violence.   

    About the Author:

    Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and has taught at Brown University. An award-winning journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida.  

  • Bamboozled By Jesus

    by Yvonne Orji

    $26.00

    *ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

    Thriving stand-up comic and actress Yvonne Orji—best known as Issa Rae's BFF on the HBO series, Insecure—shares the secrets to living the life of your dreams.

    Yvonne Orji has never shied away from being unapologetically herself, and that includes being outspoken about her faith. Known for interpreting Biblical stories and metaphors to fit current times, her humorous and accessible approach to faith leaves even non-believers inspired and wanting more.

    The way Yvonne sees it, God is a Sovereign Prankster, punking folks long before Ashton Kutcher made it cool. When she meditates on her own life—complete with unforeseen blessings and unanticipated roadblocks—she realizes it’s one big testimony to how God tricked her into living out her wildest dreams. And she wants us to join in on getting bamboozled. This is not a Self-Help book—it’s a Get Yours book!
  • On Juneteenth

    by Annette Gordon-Reed

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    The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth’s integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Texas native.

    Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed—herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s—forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.

  • State of Emergency by Tamika Mallory
    $26.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days

    Social justice leader Tamika D. Mallory states her case for action in this searing indictment of America’s historical, deadly, and continuing assault on Black and brown lives.

    From Minneapolis to Louisville, to Portland, Kenosha, and Washington, DC, America’s reckoning with its unmet promises on race and class is at a boiling point not seen since the 1960s. While conversations around pathways to progress take place on social media and cable TV, history tells us that meaningful change only comes with radical legislation and boots-on-the-ground activism. Here, Mallory shares her unique personal experience building coalitions, speaking truth to power, and winning over hearts and minds in the struggle for shared prosperity and safety.

  • Better, Not Bitter

    by Yusef Salaam

    $28.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story, in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the '80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life's experiences.

  • Democracy in Black

    by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

    $17.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. Democracy in Black is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap”—with white lives valued more than others—that still distorts our politics today. 

  • Abolition for the People

    edited by Colin Kaepernick

    $27.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Abolition for the People begins by uncovering the lethal anti-Black histories of policing and incarceration in the United States. Juxtaposing today’s moment with 19th-century movements for the abolition of slavery, freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis writes “Just as we hear calls today for a more humane policing, people then called for a more humane slavery.” Drawing on decades of scholarship and personal experience, each author deftly refutes the notion that police and prisons can be made fairer and more humane through piecemeal reformation. As Derecka Purnell argues, “reforms do not make the criminal legal system more just, but obscure its violence more efficiently.”

  • You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
    $17.00

    It started as a text between two friends. Tarana Burke, founder of the ’me too.’ Movement, texted researcher and writer, Brené Brown, to see if she was free to jump on a call. Brené assumed that Tarana wanted to talk about wallpaper. They had been trading home decorating inspiration boards in their last text conversation so Brené started scrolling to find her latest Pinterest pictures when the phone rang. But it was immediately clear to Brené that the conversation wasn’t going to be about wallpaper. Tarana’s hello was serious and she hesitated for a bit before saying, “Brené, you know your work affected me so deeply. It’s been a huge gift in my life. But as a Black woman, I’ve sometimes had to feel like I have to contort myself to fit into some of your words. The core of it rings so true for me, but the application has been harder.” Brené replied, “I’m so glad we’re talking about this. It makes sense to me. Especially in terms of vulnerability. How do you take the armor off in a country where you’re not physically or emotionally safe?” Long pause. “That’s why I’m calling,” said Tarana. “What do you think about a working together on a book about the Black experience with vulnerability and shame resilience?” There was no hesitation. Burke and Brown are the perfect pair to usher in this stark, potent collection of essays on Black shame and healing (and contribute their own introductions to the work). Along with the anthology contributors, they create a space to recognize and process the trauma of white supremacy, a space to be vulnerable and affirm the fullness of Black love and Black life.

  • White Feminism

    by Koa Beck

    $17.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Addressing today’s conversation about race, empowerment, and inclusion in America, Koa Beck, writer and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel, boldly examines the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragists to the rise of corporate feminism with clear-eyed scrutiny and meticulous detail. She also examines overlooked communities—including Native American, Muslim, transgender, and more—and their ongoing struggles for social change.

  • So You Want to Talk About Race

    by Ijeoma Oluo

    $16.99

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy -- from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans -- has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair -- and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?

  • The New Jim Crow

    by Michelle Alexander

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    Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

    Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S."

    Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

  • How to Be an Antiracist

    by Ibram X. Kendi

    $18.99

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in AmericaÑbut even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

  • Farming While Black

    by Leah Penniman

    $34.95

    Farming While Black is the first comprehensive “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. Throughout the chapters Penniman uplifts the wisdom of the African diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described—from whole farm planning, soil fertility, seed selection, and agroecology, to using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, sharing stories of ancestors, and tools for healing from the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation on the land. Woven throughout the book is the story of Soul Fire Farm, a national leader in the food justice movement.

  • We Are Each Other's Harvest

    by Natalie Baszile

    $39.99

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers’ personal experiences. In their own words, middle aged and elderly black farmers explain why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss. The "Returning Generation"—young farmers, who are building upon the legacy of their ancestors, talk about the challenges they face as they seek to redress issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations.

    These farmers are joined by other influential voices, including noted historians Analena Hope Hassberg and Pete Daniel, and award-winning author Clyde W. Ford, who considers the arrival of Africans to American shores; and James Beard Award-winning writers and Michael Twitty, reflects on black culinary tradition and its African roots. Poetry and inspirational quotes are woven into these diverse narratives, adding richness and texture, as well as stunning four-color photographs from photographers Alison Gootee and Malcom Williams, and Baszile’s personal collection.

  • Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

    by Dorothy Roberts

    $18.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    In 1997, the image of the “Welfare Queen” dominated white America’s perceptions of Black women. Legislation was being proposed to deny benefits to children born to welfare mothers and to require insertion of birth-control implants as a condition of receiving aid. Meanwhile, a booming fertility industry was catering primarily to infertile white couples.

    Dorothy Roberts’s landmark book, Killing the Black Body, made a powerful entrance into the national conversation of the era, exposing America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies, from slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s. These abuses point not only to the degradation of Black motherhood, but to the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs from the feminist agenda. Killing the Black Body turns twenty next year and is as relevant today as it was upon publication. In our current moment of Black Lives Matter, Between the World and Me, and authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Roxane Gay speaking out about feminism and race, Killing the Black Body offers a vision of reproductive freedom that respects each and every American.

  • The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

    by Nikole Hannah-Jones

    from $25.00

    One World is proud to present THE 1619 PROJECT: A New Origin Story, a book that dramatically builds on the vision of the original magazine project with major expansions of the original essays, seven new essays by historians, and dozens of new poems and pieces of fiction. The book includes a significant elaboration of the project’s Pulitzer Prize-winning lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones and a new introduction that together offer a stirring rebuttal to critics. Hannah-Jones has also written a third essay that makes the case for reparative solutions to the legacy of injustice the project documents.

    Edited by Hannah-Jones, along with New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, features editor Ilena Silverman, and New York Times executive producer Caitlin Roper, the book offers work from some of the country’s most outstanding journalists, thinkers, historians and scholars, including: Michelle Alexander, Leslie Alexander, Carol Anderson, Jamelle Bouie, Anthea Butler, Matthew Desmond, Martha Jones, Ibram Kendi, Kevin Kruse, Trymaine Lee, Tiya Miles, Wesley Morris, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Dorothy Roberts, Jeneen Interlandi, Bryan Stevenson, and Linda Villarosa.

    Woven throughout the book are works of fiction and poetry that bring to life four hundred years of history with imaginative writing by Joshua Bennett, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Rita Dove, Camille Dungy, Cornelius Eady, Eve L. Ewing, Nikky Finney, Vievee Francis, Yaa Gyasi, Forrest Hamer, Terrance Hayes, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Barry Jenkins, Tyehimba Jess, Robert Jones, Jr., A. Van Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kiese Laymon, Jasmine Mans, Terry McMillan, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Gregory Pardlo, Darryl Pinckney, Claudia Rankine, Jason Reynolds, Evie Shockley, Tim Siebles, Clint Smith, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward and Sonia Sanchez.

    The book also includes archival portrait photography of Black Americans paired with each essay, curated by Kimberly Annece Henderson.

     

  • Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays

    by Jesse McCarthy

    $27.95

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations to Toni Morrison’s revolutionary humanism to D’Angelo’s simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy’s bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and political stances that have defined the twenty-first century. Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, McCarthy contends, “something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making.” Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis.

  • Raising Confident Black Kids: A Comprehensive Guide for Empowering Parents and Teachers of Black Children

    by M.J. Fievre

    $18.95

    Now, there’s a guide to help you teach your kids how to thrive—even when it feels like the world is against them. From racial profiling and police encounters to the whitewashed lessons of history taught in schools, raising Black kids is no easy feat. In Raising Confident Black Kids, teacher M.J. Fievre passes on the tips and guidance that have helped her educate her Black students, including:

    • How to encourage creativity and build self-confidence in your kids
    • Ways to engage in activism and help build a safer community with and for your children—and ways to rest when you need to
    • How to explain systemic racism, intersectionality, and micro-aggressions
  • Parenting for Liberation: A Guide for Raising Black Children

    by Trina Greene Brown

    $19.95

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    In 2016, activist and mother Trina Greene Brown created the virtual multimedia platform Parenting for LIberation to connect, inspire, and uplift Black parents. In this book, she pairs personal anecdotes with open-ended reflective prompts; together, they help readers dismantle harmful narratives about the Black family and imagine anti-oppressive parenting methods.

  • The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness

    by Gucci Mane

    $28.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days* 

     

    In this inspiring follow-up to his iconic memoir, Gucci Mane gifts us with his playbook for living your best life. Packed with stunning photographs, The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness distills the legend’s timeless wisdom into a one-of-a-kind motivational guidebook. Gucci Mane emerged transformed after a turbulent life of violence, crime, and addiction to become a dazzling embodiment of the power of positivity, focus, and hard work. Using examples from his life of unparalleled success, Gucci Mane looks inward and upward to offer his blueprint for greatness. A must-read for anyone with big ambitions and bigger dreams.

  • Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

    by adrienne maree brown

    $16.00

    Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

  • The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

    by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

    $17.99

    In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter -- all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.

  • The Souls of Black Folk

    by W. E. B. Du Bois

    $25.00

    When The Souls of Black Folk was first published in 1903, it had a galvanizing effect on the conversation about race in America—and it remains both a touchstone in the literature of African America and a beacon in the fight for civil rights. Believing that one can know the “soul” of a race by knowing the souls of individuals, W. E. B. Du Bois combines history and stirring autobiography to reflect on the magnitude of American racism and to chart a path forward against oppression, and introduces the now-famous concepts of the color line, the veil, and double-consciousness.

    With "The Talented Tenth" and "The Souls of White Folk"

  • The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

    by Charles M. Blow

    $26.99

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a “race book.” But as violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms.

    So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It’s going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.

  • The Whiteness of Wealth

    by Dorothy A. Brown

    $17.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    In The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that tax law isn’t as colorblind as she’d once believed. She takes us into her adopted city of Atlanta, introducing us to families across the economic spectrum whose stories demonstrate how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind. From attending college to getting married to buying a home, black Americans find themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to their white peers. The result is an ever-increasing wealth gap, and more black families shut out of the American dream.

  • Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual

    by Luvvie Ajayi Jones

    $18.00

    *ship in 7-10 business days

    We’re all afraid. We’re afraid of asking for what we want because we’re afraid of hearing “no.” We’re afraid of being different, of being too much or not enough. We’re afraid of leaving behind the known for the unknown. But in order to do the things that will truly, meaningfully change our lives, we have to become professional troublemakers: people who are committed to not letting fear talk them out of the things they need to do or say to live free.

    With humor and honesty, and guided by the influence of her professional troublemaking Nigerian grandmother, Funmilayo Faloyin, Luvvie walks us through what we must get right within ourselves before we can do the things that scare us; how to use our voice for a greater good; and how to put movement to the voice we’ve been silencing—because truth-telling is a muscle.

    The point is not to be fearless, but to know we are afraid and charge forward regardless. It is to recognize that the things we must do are more significant than our fears. This book is about how to live boldly in spite of all the reasons we have to cower. Let’s go!

  • The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

    by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    from $20.00

    *ships in 7 - 10 days*

    For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, segregated West Virginia town, the church was his family and his community’s true center of gravity. Within those walls, voices were lifted up in song to call forth the best in each other, and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book, his tender and magisterial reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history, Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than four hundred years and spanning the entire country. At road’s end, we emerge with a new understanding of the centrality of the Black church to the American story—as a cultural and political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as an unparalleled incubator of talent, and as a crucible for working through the community’s most important issues, down to today.

  • The Afrominimalist's Guide to Living with Less

    by Christine Platt

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    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

     

    In The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living With Less, Christine gets right to the heart of how childhood experiences and expectations manifest in adulthood, the delicate dance between needs and wants, and the complicated weight of familial and societal pressures. A far cry from Konmaried closets, capsule wardrobes, and conspicuous consumption, Christine’s brand of “living with less” is more than a decluttering regimen. Inspired by her personal journey, Christine presents a radical revisioning of minimalism, one that celebrates the importance of history and heritage, and gives you permission to make space for what really matters…your way.

  • How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

    by Clint Smith

    $18.99

    Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

    It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

    In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.

    Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Sm

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