Celebrate Black History Month
Every February is observed as Black History Month in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. It began in 1926 as Negro History Week, promoted by Carter G. Woodson and colleagues. It was expanded to a month in 1976, the nation's bicentennial year.(1)
The J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library actively collects books, journals and other information resources in the area of African-American history, culture and experience. Below is a selected listing of some resources. Please contact library staff or faculty if you have any questions, need research assistance, or have any suggestions. Also see our Africa and African-American Research Guide.
1. Bracks, L. L. and Bracks, L. L. (2009). Black history month/negro history week (Est. 1926). In J. Smith & L. Wynn, Freedom facts and firsts: 400 years of the African American civil rights experience. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press. Retrieved from https://loyno.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://literati.credoreference.com/content/entry/vipfff/black_history_month_negro_history_week_est_1926/0
Books in the Monroe Library
Be sure to use our online catalog by subject for print books. Look up the many headings beginning with "African Americans" or authors like James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois or Zora Neale Hurston, Search topics related to the subject African Americans:
- Africans--United States
- Blacks--United States
- Ethnology--United States
- Africa--Civilization--African American influences
- Associations, institutions, etc.--African American membership
- School boards--African American membership
- Social work with African Americans
- United States--Civilization--African American influences
New Books
American Routes by
American Routes provides a comparative and historical analysis of the migration and integration of white and free black refugees from nineteenth century St. Domingue/Haiti to Louisiana and follows the progress of their descendants over the course of two hundred years. The refugees reinforcedLouisiana's tri-racial system and pushed back the progress of Anglo-American racialization by several decades But over the course of the nineteenth century, the ascendance of the Anglo-American racial system began to eclipse Louisiana's tri-racial Latin/Caribbean system. The result was a racialpalimpsest that transformed everyday life in southern Louisiana. White refugees and their descendants in Creole Louisiana succumbed to pressure to adopt a strict definition of whiteness as purity that conformed to standards of the Anglo-American racial system. Those of color, however, held on to thelogic of the tri-racial system which allowed them to inhabit an intermediary racial group that provided a buffer against the worst effects of Jim Crow segregation. The St. Domingue/Haiti migration case foreshadows the experiences of present-day immigrants of color from Latin-America and the Caribbean, many of whom chafe against the strictures of the binary U.S. racial system and resist by refusing to be categorized as either black or white. The St.Domingue/Haiti case study is the first of its kind to compare the long-term integration experiences of white and free black nineteenth century immigrants to the U.S. In this sense, it fills a significant gap in studies of race and migration which have long relied on the historical experience ofEuropean immigrants as the standard to which all other immigrants are compared.
Call Number: F380 .C87 P37 2017ISBN: 9780190624750Publication Date: 2017-04-18
Black Female Sexualities by
Western culture has long regarded black female sexuality with a strange mix of fascination and condemnation, associating it with everything from desirability, hypersexuality, and liberation to vulgarity, recklessness, and disease. Yet even as their bodies and sexualities have been the subject of countless public discourses, black women's voices have been largely marginalized in these discussions. In this groundbreaking collection, feminist scholars from across the academy come together to correct this omission--illuminating black female sexual desires marked by agency and empowerment, as well as pleasure and pain, to reveal the ways black women regulate their sexual lives.
Call Number: E-BOOKISBN: 9780813571751Publication Date: 2015-01-26
Black Movements by
The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual's poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds.
Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.
Call Number: E-BOOKISBN: 9780813588544Publication Date: 2017-04-28
Dancing in Blackness by
Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement.
Call Number: E-BOOKISBN: 9780813052380Publication Date: 2018-03-06
The Fire This Time by
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America," The Fire Next Time," as a jumping off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, "The Progressive "magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 Letter to My Nephew, which was later published in his landmark book, "The Fire Next Time." Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.
Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwin s words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generation s most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns.
Call Number: E185.615 .F526 2016ISBN: 9781501126345Publication Date: 2016-08-02
Jane Crow by
Throughout her prodigious life, activist and lawyer Pauli Murray systematically fought against all arbitrary distinctions in society, channeling her outrage at the discrimination she faced to make America a more democratic country. In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements.
Call Number: E185.97 .M95 R67 2017ISBN: 9780190656454Publication Date: 2017-05-01
The Mulatta Concubine by
Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine , Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure's centrality to the practices and production of diaspora.
Call Number: HQ1410 .W56 2016ISBN: 9780820348964Publication Date: 2016-01-15
Not Straight, Not White by
This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times--from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism--helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality. In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists--from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald--Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men.
Call Number: HQ76.27 .A37 M86 2016ISBN: 9781469626840Publication Date: 2016-03-14
The Psychic Hold of Slavery by
What would it mean to "get over slavery"? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? Should we perceive the psychic hold of slavery as a set of mental manacles that hold us back from imagining a postracist America? Or could the psychic hold of slavery be understood as a tool, helping us get a grip on the systemic racial inequalities and restricted liberties that persist in the present day? Featuring original essays from an array of established and emerging scholars in the interdisciplinary field of African American studies, The Psychic Hold of Slavery offers a nuanced dialogue upon these questions. With a painful awareness that our understanding of the past informs our understanding of the present--and vice versa--the contributors place slavery's historical legacies in conversation with twenty-first-century manifestations of antiblack violence, dehumanization, and social death. Through an exploration of film, drama, fiction, performance art, graphic novels, and philosophical discourse, this volume considers how artists grapple with questions of representation, as they ask whether slavery can ever be accurately depicted, trace the scars that slavery has left on a traumatized body politic, or debate how to best convey that black lives matter. The Psychic Hold of Slavery thus raises provocative questions about how we behold the historically distinct event of African diasporic enslavement and how we might hold off the transhistorical force of antiblack domination.
Call Number: E-BOOKISBN: 9780813583983Publication Date: 2016-07-20
Religion of the Field Negro On Black Secularism and Black Theology by
Black theology has lost its direction. To reclaim its original power and to advance racial justice struggles today black theology must fully embrace blackness and theology. But multiculturalism and religious pluralism have boxed in black theology, forcing it to speak in terms dictated by a power structure founded on white supremacy. In Religion of the Field Negro, Vincent W. Lloyd advances and develops black theology immodestly, privileging the perspective of African Americans and employing a distinctively theological analysis.
Call Number: E-BOOKISBN: 9780823277667Publication Date: 2018
Monroe Library Chat
JavaScript disabled or chat unavailable.