From the final decades of US slavery to the present, a powerful and illuminating history of a profound inequity: the special burden of infant care and loss experienced by Black women.

In the United States, Black infants are far less likely than white infants to survive their first year of life. Underlying this predicament is a history of profound loss and persistent striving, which has durably shaped Black life in America. Following generations of mothers, caregivers, laborers, and activists from the final decades of slavery to the present, Perilous Passages chronicles the intimate practices and collective strategies Black communities created and relied upon to sustain early life threatened by disease, inadequate medical care, and racialized harm.

Perilous Passages examines nineteenth-century domestic care practices that carried families through the violence of slavery and war, and traces Black eugenic ideas, the efforts of various grassroots movements, and myths and realities surrounding the 1980s panic over “crack babies.” Health professionals, legal officials, and scientific experts exerted pressure, sometimes directly―as in antimidwifery campaigns―and sometimes more subtly, through life insurance practices that devalued Black life. Wangui Muigai shows that at every turn, authorities recast infant deaths as the fault of Black women, with ongoing impact on birthing experiences and outcomes. Still, Black women and their communities have always done more than bear loss. They have produced vital knowledge about its causes, trained in specialized care, developed networks of cradle-to-grave support, and organized to reform society in ways that safeguard children.

Centering Black women’s experiences, Perilous Passages insists on visceral confrontation with the deadliness of American racism while also offering a powerful account of what makes life possible.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the David J. Langum Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award
Finalist for the Cundill History Prize 2026

A revelatory history of the laws that conditioned the everyday lives of Chinese people in the American West―and of those who negotiated, circumvented, and resisted discrimination.

Legal discrimination against Chinese people in the United States began in 1852, with a California tax on foreign gold miners that was explicitly designed to exploit Chinese labor. In the ensuing decades, California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states instituted more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled Chinese residents. Long before the Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese immigration, these laws constrained the activities and opportunities of Chinese people already living in the United States.

In this eye-opening account, Beth Lew-Williams describes a legal architecture redolent of Jim Crow but tailored to the people whom official records often referred to only as “John Doe Chinaman” and “Mary Chinaman.” Enforced by police, tax collectors, schoolteachers, missionaries, and neighbors, these laws severely limited Chinese access to American society. Cementing stereotypes of Chinese as criminals, invaders, and predators, states regulated everything from healthcare and property ownership to business formation and kinship customs. Yet Chinese communities reacted resourcefully. Many fought, evaded, and manipulated racist laws, finding ways to maintain prohibited traditions, resist unfair treatment in court, and insist on their political rights.

Revealing the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion, John Doe Chinaman tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.

From the Washington Post’s first race and ethnicity reporter, a poignant investigation into the aftermath of the Great Migration, the promise of a Second Great Migration, and what future Black communities could look like across America in this eye-opening and thoughtful study, a mix of The Warmth of Other Suns and How the Word Is Passed.

Since the 1990s, demographers have been documenting a new Great Migration: millions of Black Americans leaving Northern and Western cities for the South their parents and grandparents fled during Jim Crow. Huge numbers of Black people have been moving to Memphis, Houston, Charlotte, and other booming metropolises in the hopes of recreating the vibrant communities their grandparents once left. Have they found what they were looking for? Is it possible for Black Americans to have community, economic prosperity, and safety all in one place? And if so, where?

In the Search for Black Mecca, Emmanuel Felton examines how these questions are playing out in real lives today, going into the homes of Black Americans who are weighing what they want and where they hope to find it. He identifies three archetypes—“Those Who Stay,” “Those Who Leave,” and “Those Who Build Something New”—and reveals the costs and benefits of each decision, while seeking answers to deeper questions regarding communal responsibility, what’s needed to make Black neighborhoods thrive, and how to manage the fact that white people are often threatened by Black success. He also unravels his own family’s migration story through the lives of his two grandfathers—a prominent New Orleans dentist and a troubled musician who migrated to Oakland, California.

Through these stories, Felton crystalizes our understanding of what it means to find—or to create —our own meccas: radical spaces for Black joy, freedom, and imagination, even when the external world tries to take those places away.

The next book in the New Haven series, interconnected standalones featuring second chances, fiery passion, and Black heroines who get their happily ever afters.

Rae

Loving someone with demons is hard but leaving them is harder.

That's a lesson I learned roughly a decade ago when I left the love of my life behind. Choosing the child we made but weren't ready for over any hope for what could be. Trading in potential for reality, my dreams for motherhood and the warmth of his embrace for a cold, lonely world.

Despite how tragic it all sounds, everything turned out okay. I made peace with my decisions, soothed the ache in my heart with harsh truths that have remained firmly in tact until...well, until now.

Now, I'm back in New Haven and nothing is the way it should be. The man I left behind is not the one I keep running into around town. He's steady, dependable, stable, ready to be a father to our daughter and desperate to do more than co-parent with me.

Hunter

couldn't stop wanting Rachel Prince if I tried. Not that I ever have. Tried, that is. Why would I when she's the only good thing I've ever craved, the only addiction I've had that didn't try to destroy me?

When she left me, I wasn't mad. I didn't want her to go, but I think by the end we both knew she couldn't stay. There was too much darkness around us, and it was all emanating from me.

My addiction. My pain. My grief overshadowing hers.

I wasn't the man she needed or the partner she deserved. She did the right thing, getting out, taking our kid with her. But knowing that doesn't make it hurt any less.

It does, however, make me determined.

To keep my decade long sobriety streak going.

To make up for every day I missed of my daughter's life.

To win back the love of my life and never let her go again.

In a piercing blend of biography, criticism, and memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Salamishah Tillet explores Nina Simone’s life and the impact of her legacy.

In Nina Simone and the World She Made, Salamishah Tillet traces Nina Simone’s transformation from child prodigy to musical icon and fearless civil rights activist. When racism thwarted her dreams of becoming a classical pianist, Simone reinvented herself and created a sound wholly her own—one that would catapult her into stardom and the heart of the Black Power movement.

Decades later, Simone’s music inspired the hip-hop generation and Tillet’s own profound political awakening. From buying her first Nina Simone album to becoming a creative and activist, Tillet’s private encounters with Simone’s work grew into a broader exploration of her legacy. Exploring Simone’s unique impact on the American cultural landscape through the women who shaped her and those whom she shaped, Tillet reveals how art can be a powerful driver of social activism, and the struggles and sacrifices it involves.

With honest, lyrical prose, Tillet’s intimate portrait brings us close to Simone, while showing us how the singer’s voice captured the pain and promise of America and resonates in the fight for equality today. Nina Simone and the World She Made urges us to listen to Simone’s music—not just as a reflection of the past, but as a guide for the future.

The Talented Mr. Ripley meets the Wu-Tang Clan: An American Saga in this dark psychological thriller.

Thomas “Maz” Kincaid lives a lavish life as a rising rap star: money, influence, and fame. But Maz’s success rests on a lie—his lyrics to his chart-topping album belong to someone else, his foster brother, Adonis.

Adonis, fresh out of prison is done watching his brother live off his talent and launches a calculated campaign of vengeance. But Maz won’t let all he’s worked for be taken away. He’s willing to lie, manipulate, and even kill to protect the fraudulent life he’s built.

As the rivalry escalates, the line between victim and villain blurs. With both men—damaged, cunning, and ruthless, locked in a psychological war where only one can survive the spotlight. Who will rule the stage, and who will end up in a grave?

Dark, complex, and suspenseful, All the Smoke is a cautionary tale, exploring identity, trauma, and the psychopathy behind stardom in the music industry.

Ten years after her E! reality TV show Rob & Chyna aired, the entrepreneur and actress formerly known as Blac Chyna is subverting expectations and sharing where her faith walk leads her.

For years, Angela White’s public persona and private life was that of the Kardashian-adjacent Blac Chyna, former stripper and reality television star. Born Angela Renée White on May 11, 1988, in Washington, DC, she first burst onto the scene in 2010 as Nicki Minaj’s stunt double in Kanye West’s Monster video. That same year, Drake’s shout-out in Miss Me put her name in the game, sparking buzz that landed her in national magazines. Her exotic look and hustle at Miami’s King of Diamonds strip club turned heads, but it was her high-profile relationships with rapper Tyga (father of her son, King Cairo) and Rob Kardashian (father of her daughter, Dream) that cemented her fame, along wih her unapologetic persona.

What many didn’t realize was that privately her notoriety was additionally complicated by an alcohol addiction that drew her away from the person she’d been raised to be. But four years ago, Angela made the decision to reclaim herself, which meant stepping out of the toxic limelight, removing a number of physical enhancements, and sobering up. Both for herself and for her children.

But Sober Mine is about more than fighting addiction. It’s about redemption, finding balance, and rebuilding one’s self from the inside out. Angela returned to her faith, was baptized in 2022, and she’s been sober for nearly four years and counting. She’s also pursuing a degree in divinity training and education.

In Sober Mine, Angela pulls back the curtain and shares the personal journey that led her to the world stage, giving insight into what you thought you thought you knew about her from those reality television days, and she does it all in her signature voice, direct with a side order of humor.

This book is about grabbing onto faith, discovering one’s strength, and learning you don’t have be perfect to live the life you deserve—you just gotta keep it real.

In this meticulously researched and vividly written account, a prominent historian reclaims a forgotten incident of racial violence in the Jim Crow South.

The Rifle and the Plough reconstructs a little-known episode from the summer of 1910, when the Black farming settlement of Sandy Beulah in East-Central Texas came under attack. White mobs waged war on prosperous Black landowners; rumors became weapons; celebration became provocation. Historian Steven A. Reich shows how the massacre unfolded and why it happened: the growing accumulation of land by Black residents, heightened racial tensions following boxer Jack Johnson’s heavyweight title victory, and white resistance to Black autonomy and public festivity, including Juneteenth. The Rifle and the Plough recovers the rise and destruction of a thriving Black community and asks why this history still matters. By linking racial violence to struggles over historical memory, land theft, and accountability, Reich speaks directly to contemporary debates about how the nation confronts its past, what justice demands of the present, and what reparative futures might yet be imagined.

59 illustrations

Together for the first time in this beautiful boxed set, the landmark Love Song to the Nation trilogy by the feminist icon bell hooks, includes the New York Times bestsellers All About Love, Communion, and Salvation.

All About Love: New Visions reveals how lovelessness results in a polarized society, and how we can do the work to heal these divisions. This book is a roadmap to understanding how we can build caring, compassionate, and loving spaces into our homes, schools, and workplaces.

Communion: The Female Search for Lovechallenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as a heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. It reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives.

Salvation: Black People and Love Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans.

There are so many things we once believed were true, good, and beautiful that we now no longer believe. Ideas we once defended with confidence now seem naive, misguided, or even harmful.

Every generation looks back at what their parents believed and rolls their eyes. Every generation thinks they stand on the right side of history, but history has a way of humbling our confidence. That only means future generations will look back and judge us to be wrong, false, and bad.

One day, we also will be on the wrong side of history. It's okay to be wrong about things that don't matter, like cultural trends, personal tastes, and leisure activities. But what if we're wrong about things that really matter, like faith, God, and eternal consequences? What if we've been believing all the wrong things? In How to Be on the Right Side of History, Sam Chan reveals how--when it comes to things of ultimate truth, goodness, beauty, and God--we can have confidence that our beliefs aren't just fads but are grounded in eternal reality.

Capone promised he’d keep his family safe, but Erin’s afraid he’ll die trying, in the third book of #BookTok favorite Jahquel J.’s Delgato Family saga.

Everything’s looking up for Erin. She married her best friend in a picturesque sunset ceremony on the beaches of Barbados, they’re expecting a baby girl, and the pair are surrounded by their loved ones. Erin’s even made nice with Capone’s ex.

But danger’s never far away, and that scares Erin. Every day, Capone risks his life handling business in the streets. Then, a serious health scare forces him to slow down, and Erin and her brother, Jaiden―now entrenched in Capone’s world himself―purchase firearms to protect themselves.

Having dealt with arrests, shoot-outs, high-speed chases, and Molotov cocktails, Erin just wants to live with her husband and daughter in peace. Now that Capone has decided to take a step back from the grind, will she finally get the happily-ever-after she longs for?

The third book in the Delgato Family universe, Capone took BookTok by storm.

Capone III is an urban romance featuring depictions of murder, domestic violence, and substance abuse as well as explicit scenes. It is intended for mature readers.

We Made the World: Five Centuries of Queens, Warriors, and Other Foremothers traces five centuries of history through twelve extraordinary women of African descent—from queens and warriors to artists and activists—weaving together collective memory, oral tradition, and personal grief into a landmark work that places Black women at the center of world history.

In 1949, a seamstress from a small coastal town in the Gold Coast colony stood up in a room full of men and voted to split from the most powerful political party in the country. Her name was Hannah Kudjoe. She spent the next decade organizing the women who would win Ghana's first democratic election and help make it the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from European colonial rule. When Nkrumah published his autobiography, she wasn't in it.

We Made the World does for twelve women what it does for Hannah Kudjoe. It finds the woman who was in the room, who was essential to the room, and whose name was removed from the record the moment her usefulness to powerful men was exhausted.

We're talking about Queen Njinga of Angola, who fought the Portuguese to a standstill for forty years and died at eighty still a sovereign. Wangarĩ Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who saved a Nairobi forest by walking upstream through a river at dawn to plant trees while the police watched. Brenda Fassie, the queer Black pop icon who sang South Africa through the end of apartheid and whose music still stops a room on any continent.

The author traveled to eleven countries to write this book. She gathered oral histories from descendants and community keepers across four continents. And she wrote it while experiencing great loss and grief which means this book knows in its bones what it costs to carry someone's memory, and what it costs not to.

We Made the World is five hundred years of history rewritten from the inside. It is the book that asks what we have lost by not knowing these women's names, and begins the important work of giving that back to us all.