Winners

Victoria Chang was born in 1970 in Detroit, the daughter of an engineer and a math teacher, both immigrants from Taiwan. Their daughter inherited a quantitative aptitude and earned an…

In the final paragraph of Memorial Drive, Natasha Trethewey describes driving with her mother toward Gulfport, Mississippi, where their relationship began in 1966 when Natasha was born. “Often, when I am…

James McBride has worn a porkpie hat, a goatee and a wry smile on his way to becoming a celebrated artist, Spike Lee collaborator and a National Humanities Medalist. President…

Scholar Vincent Brown traces a lifelong interest in warfare to growing up in a family steeped in military service and to his childhood in San Diego, “one of the largest…

Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in Odessa, part of the former Soviet Union. When he was 4 years old, a doctor misdiagnosed his mumps as a cold and sent…

Public intellectual Charles King lectures widely, writes extensively and pops up as an expert on “The Rachel Maddow Show” and other cable outlets. He teaches international affairs and government at…

The novelist, literary critic and short story writer Namwali Serpell was born in Zambia 16 years after her country threw off colonial rule. She is the daughter of a British-born…

Eric Foner—public intellectual, historian and educator —is among the most influential American historians of the last half-century. He has shaped how scholars and the public understand the politics and ideas…

The novelist Tommy Orange grew up in a city – Oakland, California – as the majority of Native American people do. “We know the sound of the freeway better than…

Tracy K. Smith, the daughter of an engineer and a teacher, is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Massachusetts, she grew up in northern California, where her four older…

Sonia Sanchez—poet, playwright, activist and educator—is an architect of the Black Arts Movement, a mid-20th century renewal of black will, energy and artist awareness. She has spent most of her…

Public intellectual Andrew Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, where he was honored with the Great Teacher Award by the Society of Columbia Graduates….

N. Scott Momaday – poet, watercolorist, novelist, scholar and storyteller – is the dean of Native American writers. He is a celebrated exemplar of the oral tradition and founder of…

Poet Shane McCrae was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up mostly in Texas and California. “I failed every class from sixth grade up,” he once said, but the poetry…

The novels of Jesmyn Ward create a fictional place – Bois Sauvage – rooted in her rural hometown on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The vividness of Bois Sauvage and…

Poet and public intellectual Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. His family moved often, but he grew up mostly in Topeka, Kansas, with regular jaunts to northern and southern…

Karan Mahajan was born in Stamford, Connecticut and grew up in New Delhi. When he was 12, Kashmiri separatists set off a car bomb in a market a few miles…

Margot Lee Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Va., the daughter of two people with doctorates—Robert Benjamin Lee, a NASA research scientist, and Margaret G. Lee, a professor of English. But…

Peter Ho Davies grew up in Coventry, England, the son of a Welsh engineer and a Malaysian Chinese dentist. It’s a soccer saturated place, and Sook Ying Davies remembers carrying…

Tyehimba Jess grew up in Detroit, the son of a nurse educator and a director of laboratories for the city public health department. He thanks both Della Mae McGraw and…

Isabel Allende—novelist, feminist and philanthropist—is considered the most widely-read writer working in Spanish, having sold more than 67 million books. At 40, she burst upon the literary scene with her…

Lillian Faderman, a leading scholar of LGBT history, writes that she exists because her unmarried mother Mary, a Jewish garment worker in lower Manhattan, had the gumption to refuse a…

Mary Morris was born in Chicago in 1947, and although she left to study at Tufts University and settled in the east, her hometown tie remained. Now a professor of…

In the 1980s, when Brian Seibert was growing up in suburban Los Angeles, he learned a few basic tap steps in dance class. As an adult in New York City,…

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, raised in New York City, found himself writing much of his second poetry collection in the mountains of Aspen, Colorado. He is a translator and critic with…

Orlando Patterson is a public intellectual and the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1969. Praised across the humanities as a Renaissance scholar,…

Marilyn Chin was born Mei Ling Chin in Hong Kong. Her family moved to Portland, Oregon, where her father transliterated her name to Marilyn, the subject of her biting, funny…

Jericho Brown was born Nelson Demery III, raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University in New Orleans. He worked as a speech writer to the…

David Brion Davis is a leading American intellectual and cultural historian, the author or editor of 16 books. Anisfield-Wolf-winning historian Ira Berlin observed that “no scholar has played a larger…

Richard S. Dunn is a professor emeritus of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and directed the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. He was born…

Marlon James was born in 1970 in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of a police detective and her lawyer husband. James credits his mother’s perceptiveness in the volatile decade after his…

Anthony Marra was born in Washington, D.C. At 19, he worked full-time in a UPS office before enrolling at the University of Southern California, where he received his bachelor’s of…

The year it won, The Big Smoke won for Fiction. With the addition of the Poetry category in 2015, we have retroactively added this title to the Poetry category. Adrian…

Ari Shavit is a commentator on Israeli public television and a leading columnist for the daily newspaper Haaretz. Born in Israel, Shavit served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense…

Sir Theodore Wilson Harris is a celebrated Guyanese writer and a visionary explorer of the interdependence among history, landscape and humanity. Born to an insurance agent and his wife, Harris…

George Lamming is an illustrious Caribbean novelist, poet and cultural critic from Barbados. He was just 23 and living in London when he wrote “In the Castle of My Skin.”…

Wole Soyinka, winner of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, is a Nigerian playwright, poet, essayist, and profile in courage. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986,…

Far From the Tree is a magisterial book from Andrew Solomon that parses diversity in its most intimate setting: the family. Solomon considers how parents navigate the world when a…

The year it won, My Favorite Warlord won for Fiction. With the addition of the Poetry category in 2015, we have retroactively added this title to the Poetry category. Eugene…

The Yellow Birds is a scalding first book that pivots on the last weeks of friendship between 18-year-old Private Daniel Murphy and 21-year-old Private John Bartle, who makes a rash…

Laird Hunt is the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. Kind One, a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner for fiction, is a haunting novel that explores…

As the Canadian-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, Esi Edugyan grew up between worlds. “Loyalties were always mixed,” she said, “and the world inside the walls of my home was significantly…

David Blight is a professor of history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. His newest book, American Oracle:…

David Livingstone Smith is associate professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, where he teaches on the philosophies of biology, ethics, metaphysics, mind, psychology, and…

It is surprising to note that Arnold Rampersad, one of our nation’s premier biographers, was born and raised outside the country. “Growing up as a schoolboy in Trinidad, I received…

More than 20 years ago, David Eltis and David Richardson decided to combine their studies of the transatlantic slave trade and their data collection efforts into one database, which they…

Nicole Krauss’ fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories. She is best known for her novel, The History of Love (2005), which won the…

Wisconsin native Mary Helen Stefaniak grew up in what she refers to as a “bicultural household”: Her father was from Milwaukee, her mother from Gordon, Georgia. Stefaniak’s first novel, The…

John Edgar Wideman grew up in Pittsburgh, a city that figures prominently in his writing. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the…

Isabel Wilkerson is a prize-winning journalist who has spent most of her career as a national correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times. Inspired by the migration of…

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher born in New York City and raised in Washington, DC. Alexander has degrees from Yale University and Boston University and completed…

Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani novelist, was born into a literary family. Her mother is a critic and short-story writer, her grandmother was a memoirist, and her great-aunt, a novelist and…

William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of only 20 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty…

Through the power of media, Oprah Winfrey has created an unparalleled connection with people around the world. As supervising producer and host of the top-rated, award-winning “The Oprah Winfrey Show,”…

Erdrich’s 13th novel, a multi-generational tour de force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance, finds its roots in the 1911 slaughter of a farming family near Pluto, North Dakota. The…

Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:…

From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le’s accomplished debut. In Halflead…

Paule Marshall is the author of five novels: Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969); Praisesong for the Widow (1983); Daughters (1991); and The Fisher King…

Readers with an eye on European politics will recognize Ali as the Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who faced death threats after collaborating on a film about domestic violence…

Junot Díaz’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Best American Short Stories. His critically praised bestselling debut book, Drown, led to his inclusion…

Mohsin Hamid was born in Lahore, Pakistan. After completing his schooling in Pakistan, Hamid attended Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree from the Woodrow Wilson…

William Melvin Kelley grew up in the Bronx, New York, where he attended the Fieldston School. At Harvard College, he studied with John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish, winning the Dana…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and James Nwoye Adichie. While the family’s ancestral…

Born in Atlanta, Taylor Branch is an American author and historian best known for his award-winning trilogy chronicling the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the history of…

Martha Collins is the recently retired Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and one of the editors of FIELD magazine and an editor of Oberlin College Press….

Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Leslie and Naomi Legum Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. Steel Drivin’ Man, which explores the real life and legend of…

Novelist William Demby, born on Christmas Day 1922 in Pittsburgh, PA, grew up in Clarksburg, WV. He attended West Virginia State College for a time, with World War II interrupting…

Jill Lepore is Professor of History at Harvard University and chair of the History and Literature Program. A contributor to The New Yorker, Lepore has also written for The New…

Zadie Smith was born in northwest London and continues to live in the area. Her first novel, White Teeth, was published in 2000 and won the Guardian First Book Award,…

In her third novel, The Dew Breaker, the prolific Edwidge Danticat spins a series of related stories around a shadowy central figure, a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. who reveals…

A. Van Jordan combines the tragic poignancy of the blues with the cinematic sweep of a documentary in his deeply humane and highly imaginative second book, M·A·C·N·O·L·I·A, which focuses on…

Johnson rose from poverty in Galveston, Texas, to become the first black heavyweight-boxing champion only to end up ruined by his affairs with white women, which landed him in prison…

August Wilson is the author of Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King…

Eminent historian Berlin revisits and extends by a century the territory of his honored and groundbreaking Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (1998), incorporating the…

In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who…

Politicians rail about welfare queens, crack babies and deadbeat dads, but what do they know about the real struggle it takes to survive being poor? Journalist LeBlanc spent some 10…

Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in St. Lucia, Windward Islands, the West Indies, and has maintained a permanent residence in Trinidad for more…

Stephen L. Carter has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in American politics and culture to the impact of integrity and civility in…

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism visits upon people’s…

Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing…

Reetika Vazirani is the author of White Elephants (Beacon, 1996) selected by Marilyn Hacker for a Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She was educated at Wellesley College and the University…

Quincy Jones cannot be pigeonholed. In his 50-year music career, Jones has worn the hats of composer, record producer, artist, arranger, conductor, instrumentalist and record company executive. His musical career…

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. was a managing director of Lazard Frères & Co. LLC in New York. Before his work at Lazard, he served as a senior executive partner with…

Although he just published his second novel, Colson Whitehead is already a highly decorated author. His latest work, John Henry Days, received several distinguished literary awards, including the 2002 Young…

Jay Wright’s life and career is as rich and diverse as his acclaimed writing. Known best for his books of poetry, Wright has also authored plays and essays. His work…

Lucille Clifton grew up in a home filled with books and poetry by African American authors. Her father labored in the steel mills while her mother worked as a laundress,…

The life of scholar, philosopher, activist and historian, W.E.B. Du Bois, is examined in David Levering Lewis’ W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Fifteen…

In the world of boxing, a “cut man” is someone who stops the blood flow so that the match can continue. For twenty years, F.X. Toole worked around the world…

Although Ernest Gaines has spent much of his adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area, all of his work returns to the setting of his southern Louisiana childhood, with…

Author of two award-winning novels, Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee believes that “a good story is a journey of the mind, not a record of fact.”  Lee regards writing as a…

Prominent author, professor, and Palestinian advocate, Edward W. Said was one of the foremost cultural critics of the postwar world. He wrote extensively on history, politics, literature, music and philosophy….

One of America’s most uncompromising novelists, Russell Banks received the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1999 for Cloudsplitter, a book about the abolitionist John Brown. Narrated by Brown’s son Owen, the novel…

In June 1997 when President Bill Clinton assembled a seven-member panel to advise him about racial strife in the United States, he chose John Hope Franklin as its chair. This…

John Lewis was one of ten children born to sharecroppers in Pike County, Alabama. He graduated from high school and entered the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, in…

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1941. Her books of poetry are Tender (1997), winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The…

Walter Mosley was born to an African American father and a Jewish mother in South Central Los Angeles, where he lived until he left for college in Vermont. After college…

Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of a tenant farmer and the youngest of 15 children. He left home when he was 16, shortly after his…

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson, and as a child was greatly influenced by her mother, Annie Richards. At sixteen years of age, after successfully completing a British education…

Recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1997 for his memoir, The Color of Water, James McBride is a jazz musician as well as a writer, and the jazz tradition of…

Adopted by Albert Lee Murray and his wife, Mattie James Murray, Albert Murray grew up in Magazine Point, outside of Mobile. Often characterized as a member of the “Talented Tenth,”…

It might at first seem a strange move for Madison Smartt Bell (author of Soldier’s Joy, Zero db, and Save Me, Joe Louis) to abandon his milieu of disturbed drifters…

“god bless mommy. god bless nanny … god, don’t punish me because I’m black …” This is an excerpt of a prayer taken from one of the saddest, most disheartening…

The only child of Rachel Pease Benson and Isaac Christopher West, Dorothy West started her education in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of two under the tutelage of Bessie Trotter,…

Gibbons’s first novel takes place in east Texas in 1910 during the time of white rule-not by law but by lynch mob. Amid the suffocating racism and fear, half-Choctaw, half-white…

In this evocative memoir, Brent Staples poses some compelling questions: Where does the family end the self begin? What do we owe our families and what do we owe ourselves?…

Like Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, Tucker’s book debunks the application of “race science” to social problems and notions about the heritability of intelligence. Tucker’s accessible book focuses on the…

Poet and novelist Ortiz Cofer offers her readers an affecting view of Puerto Rican New York in this autobiographical assortment of essays and poems. Her stories celebrate, mourn, and honor…

The life of scholar, philosopher, activist and historian, W.E.B. Du Bois, is examined in David Levering Lewis’ W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Fifteen…

Takaki was the author and editor of more than 20 books, including Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America (1979), Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of…

“My first memories,” writes Kwame Anthony Appiah in the preface to In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), “are of a place called ‘Mbrom,’ a small…

Mexican American writer, poet, and ardent feminist, Sandra Cisneros writes stories that are seldom heard in mainstream America-those of the diverse experiences of Hispanic women in contemporary urban society. Her…

The overwhelming response to The Language of the Goddess from artists, women, mythologists and many others was, for Marija Gimbutas, a complete surprise. When The Civilization of the Goddess appeared…

The great irony of the career of Ralph Ellison, one of the most celebrated of American novelists, may be that when he died at the age of 80, he had…

Despite what it said in the New York Times or the Congressional Record, not everybody in America got the word right away about the civil rights movement. Thus it was…

Peter Hayes is the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University. Hayes specializes in the history of Germany in the 20th century, particularly the…

Elaine and Harry Mensh argue that by using tests to decide whether or not a child should receive a quality education, schools can continue to apportion superior and inferior educational…

In this quietly provocative and poignant collection of poems, Waniek records the history of her family, beginning with her great-great-grandmother’s experiences as a slave in the South, through her father’s…

American photographer Carol Beckwith and Australian photographer Angela Fisher discovered their common pursuit upon their chance meeting in Kenya in 1978: to understand and depict the richness of African culture…

Walter A. Jackson’s Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience is more than a biographical sketch of a unique political economist. Jackson gracefully examines the development of Myrdal’s thought as a political…

During the survivalist craze of the early 1980’s, extremist political movements were thriving. There was the Christian Patriots Defense League, which insisted that white Americans, not Jews, were God’s chosen…

These two volumes by Hugh Honour, a distinguished British art historian, provide an exhaustive survey of European and American depictions of black people in painting and sculpture during the century…

With an eloquence that exemplifies the beauty of the spiritual, Kendrick creates 34 black slave women who relate lives of appalling deprivation in lyrical monologues. Told in an earthy and…

Taylor Branch received the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1989 for Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. A sweeping and authoritative examination of the work and days of Rev….

As a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and in frequent public appearances throughout the media, Henry Louis Gates Jr. emerged in the mid-1990s as a national spokesperson on…

This book tells the story of Ivory Perry, a black worker and community activist who, for more than thirty years, has distributed the leaflets, carried the picket signs, and planned…

Australia’s Aborigines, who have lived on that continent for at least 40,000 years, were until recently considered extremely “primitive.” Today, anthropologists recognize their complex social patterns and rich cosmology, their…

This acclaimed volume is the first to document the life of the Maya of today, a remarkable people who are the direct heirs to the magnificent Maya culture of Pre-Columbian…

“I have come to the abstractions of politics through the flesh and blood of individual behavior. I didn’t know what politics was about until I saw it all happening to…

“I’m interested in how men are educated, how women relate to each other, how we are able to love, how we balance political and personal forces, who survives in certain…

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that all citizens have the right to vote without regard to their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”…

With this final volume of his superb biography, Rampersad comes to the racist exclusion and crippling attacks from the right that forced Hughes to scramble for a meager living. Rampersad…

In 1980 Sheehy found herself in one of life’s passages which she had explored so thoroughly in her book Passages. Providentially, while on assignment in Cambodia, she met Phat Mohm,…

This volume is an essential for kachina collectors. Author Barton Wright is known as the authority on Hopi kachinas and this book, his major work, shows why. It contains descriptions…

In 1977, a Chicago-based Nazi group announced its plans to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois, the home of hundreds of Holocaust survivors. The shocked survivor community rose in protest and the…

Breytenbach composed this docu-dream during a period of incarceration. Mouroir (mourir: to die + miroir: mirror) is a ship of thought moving with its own hallucinatory logic through a sea…

It has long been alleged that officials in the Roosevelt administration knew, in surprising detail, about Adolf Hitler’s plans to exterminate all the Jews in Nazi Europe–and that these officials…

José Alcina Franch was a Catalan archaeologist and ethnological historian, born in Spain. He studied at the University of Valencia, and developed an interest in archaeology, initially with a historical…

When Richard Rodriguez published his collection of six autobiographical essays, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez in 1981, roars erupted from both ends of the political spectrum. His…

When awarding the prize, the Nobel committee described Soyinka, the creator of over 20 major works, as “one of the finest poetical playwrights that have written in English,” and also…

In 1899 the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann (later to be one of Hitler’s early financial backers) brought out a rambling book of a thousand pages, The Foundations of the Nineteenth…

This book has beautiful photography, and beautiful text by a man who is of the Maasai Tribe. Tepilit Ole Saitoti’s commentary and insight into his people really make the photographs…

Known as an eloquent and creative thinker, Jamake Highwater developed an artistic perspective as fluid and dynamic as the evolution of his own name. Highwater wrote about seemingly disparate fields…

To understand the way children develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it is necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of…

For most of human history hunting and gathering was a universal way of life. Richard Borshay Lee spent over three years conducting fieldwork among the !Kung San, an isolated population…

Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston laces childhood memories, talk-stories, and Chinese legend with fantastical epic poetry, developing a unique literary form that Ms. critic E.M. Broner describes as “kinesthetic…

Simple Justice is the definitive history of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education and the epic struggle for racial equality in this country. Combining intensive research with original…

Michi Weglyn had great stature in the history of twentieth century civil rights, yet she was a thin, small-framed woman whose self-effacing style masked her determination to bear witness against…

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, was a scholar of Jewish life and history whose book The War Against the Jews is widely regarded as a pioneering study of the Nazi genocide. Mrs….

The Arabs is an authoritative firsthand portrait of the character and aspirations of this powerful and mysterious people. Chapters outlining the development of the Arab people and their Islamic religion…

This weighty book intends to “tell the story of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible.” Less given over to theoretical and topical polemic than Genovese’s earlier works on…

The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas in Europe is a fascinating account of the development of the Aryan myth and European racial ideology. The author’s research…

Charles Duguid was a Scottish-born medical practitioner and Aboriginal rights campaigner who recorded his experience working among the Australian Aborigines in a number of books. While teaching at Glasgow University,…

Widely acclaimed for its comprehensive and sensitive portrait of one of America’s most renowned writers, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright presents a profound and thorough interpretation of Wright’s work….

Born in South Africa in 1933, Albie Sachs was raised in an environment of political activism.  From an early age Sachs’ father and mother encouraged him to fight against Apartheid,…

The Dreyfus case underscored and intensified bitter divisions within French politics and society. The Dreyfus affair was a scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It…

The island is nearly deserted, haunting, and beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw Island, America is a world away….

A fascinating, thorough historical insight into the ongoing relationship of British and American abolitionists, which opens up the minutiae of politics of the day to the modern reader. It is…

Behind Ghetto Walls chronicles the family lives of some 10,000 children and adults who live in an all-Negro public housing project in St Louis. The Pruitt-Igoe project is only one…

This volume has established itself as indispensable and invaluable reading, as a starting point for anyone interested in America’s failure to absorb a large minority of a different color. In…

In the only book to date to explore the period between the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the discovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s experiments in genetics,…

Social psychologist, systems-theorist, and futurist David Loye is the author of widely respected books on the use of the brain and mind in prediction, political leadership, race relations, and is the…

Mokgatle’s keen interest in reading inspired him to enroll at a number of night schools in Pretoria and Johannesburg. Some of these were run by members of the South African…

This critically acclaimed work provides a comprehensive history that both illuminates and clarifies events past and present. It surveys Africa’s history from its earliest beginnings to the present day, exploring…

Few issues have been the focus of so much concern as the interrelated problems of race relations and violence in America. Two presidential commissions investigated these subjects exhaustively; both tried…

This book is not, and does not pretend to be, a sociological analysis of the Mexican-American ethnic group or minority. Rather, Mr. Steiner, who is already known for his popular…

This book tells the story of the late colonial and early reservation history of the Seneca Indians, and of the prophet Handsome Lake, his visions, and the moral and religious…

As a historian of the American South, Dan T. Carter’s writings deal with themes such as regionalism, nationalism, racism, truth, and the law. Carter’s book Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the…

Standing Rock Sioux Vine Deloria Jr. has achieved an eminence amongst Native Americans that New York Times reviewer Dee Brown has likened to the impact of Sitting Bull a century…

With the exception of the larger African states, Brazil contains the largest negro population in the world. The living conditions of this group and their integration into the predominantly Caucasian…

Dahlstrom and Baughman conducted research on achievement and ability in African American and White students in what were then segregated schools in the South. With an emphasis on individual differences…

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas. As an infant she moved with her parents, David and Keziah Wims Brooks, to the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, where she has…

The story of the Leo Frank case reads like a Greek tragedy. As The New Republic wrote at the time: “In ancient times when a man was treated as Leo…

Stuart Levine was educated at Harvard (AB) and Brown (MA, PhD), and has been a professional concert musician, network music commentator, scholarly author and editor, journal editor, lecturer and teacher….

The myth of Jews as children of the Devil, mysterious, uncanny and possessed of sinister powers, has persisted since the second century, when they were accused of killing Christian children,…

Psychiatrist and humanist Dr. Robert Coles wrote his groundbreaking work, Children in Crisis: A Study in Courage and Fear (Little Brown & Co) in 1968. The study was based on…

The chapters in this book deal with persistent problems of Jewish identity. Kahler claims these can be fully understood only by awareness of the close interconnection between the singular ethnic…

Winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture depicts the various ways different societies have responded to the intrinsic contradictions of slavery from antiquity to…

With tape recorder in hand, Oscar Lewis documented the distinct voices of poverty among Native Americans, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. He writes, “I believe [tape transcription] captures the full flavor…

The idea of the unity of mankind did not come easily to the Greeks. Its eventual emergence has been ascribed to various sources, not least to Alexander the Great. Baldry…

When Claude Brown wrote his autobiography, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), he expected to sell 100 copies. Over four million copies later, Manchild remains a classic, echoing the slave…

Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Henning, Tennessee, with maternal relatives who spent many hours telling family stories, some of which extended back to Africa….

The first full-scale sociological survey of the assimilation of minorities in America, this classic work presents significant conclusions about the problems of prejudice and discrimination in America and offers positive…

In The Struggle for Equality, the renowned Civil War historian James McPherson offered an important and timely analysis of the abolitionist movement and the legal basis it provided to the…

This authoritative and beautifully written book, by the distinguished president of Brandeis University, was first published in 1930 and now appears in its fifth edition, completely revised and enlarged. As…

Jim Silver keeps a loaded shotgun in his Oxford, Miss., home. It is not for hunting; it is for protection. For 27 years Silver has spoken out against the segregationist…

The tightly knit ethnic neighborhoods that defined New York City in the 1930’s and 1940’s produced two men – Nathan Glazer (top photo) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (bottom photo) –…

Any work by Harold Isaacs, the author of that great classic, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, is of considerable interest. And he has not disappointed us. He has written…

The Silliman Lectures at Yale University have been responsible for many books which have greatly influenced the progress of scientific work in the twentieth century. One of the foremost scientists of…

Black Like Me is a non-fiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Mansfield, Texas and the book describes his six-week…

To Sir, With Love is an inspiring autobiographical novel set in the East End of London based on true events concerned with Braithwaite taking up a teaching post in a…

In the summer of 1960, Louis E. Lomax, an American Negro reporter visited several countries in Africa. Lomax skipped the newly independent nations; except for Egypt and Ethiopia, all of…

Combining archeological evidence and scholarly research, Davidson traces the exciting development of the rich kingdoms of the lost cities of Africa, fifteen hundred years before European ships first came to…

John Haynes Holmes was a prominent Unitarian minister and pacifist, noted for his anti-war activism. Holmes was born in Philadelphia, studied at Harvard, graduating in 1902, and Harvard Divinity School,…

King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. King attended local segregated public…

This volume deals with the problems of prejudice and discrimination in three major sections. Part one consists of ten chapters on the causes and consequences of prejudice and discrimination. In…

 Into the lives of two ragged little Negro girls came an angel—a white angel. So it seemed to Veanie and Mingie Bennett, seven-year-old twins in a Florida town, half-savage, motherless,…

With astonishing erudition, a commanding sense of style, and a gift for gripping narrative, Senhor Freyre has applied all the modern techniques of social study to the remarkably successful melting-pot…

This book by an American social scientist and a social worker is “a practical guide for those actively engaged in reducing segregation and discrimination in public institutions, voluntary social agencies,…

This book is an important addition both to the list of general works about the culture of the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest and to the study of medicine as…

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — And then run? …Maybe it just sags like…

When asked to classify his writing, Farley Mowat has quipped, “The only people who belong in pigeonholes are pigeons.” Mowat’s works are difficult to classify since he is a masterful…

Daughter of a Dutch mother and Chinese father, Elizabeth Chou assumed the pseudonym Han Suyin, meaning “the Chinese gamble-for liberty.” Suyin was profoundly sympathetic to the government of Mao Tse…

In 1949, while the world was still licking its war wounds, Laurens van der Post set off for the British colony of Nyasaland (now Malawi) to map two mountains still…

This book is the story of the Warsaw ghetto from November 1939 to May 1943 told by means of a fictional diary kept by Noach Levinson, self-appointed archivist of Polish…

Punishment Without Crime, subtitled What You Can Do About Prejudice, is intended to be a handbook in the struggle against intolerance. Dr. Fineberg does not waste time in denouncing bias…

Shirley Graham Du Bois was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the oldest of David A. Graham and Etta (Bell) Graham’s five children. Growing up, she moved with her family to various…

A white South African of British descent, Alan Paton wrote what is considered one of the great African novels in English. His mother was a teacher and his father was…

This book is a good history of Indian life in the Americas before and after Columbus. The author, who was U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs under FDR, is a clear…

This prize-winning novel is about a young woman who unknowingly signs up to teach classes at an all-black college in New Orleans in 1920. It is one of the best—and…

By writing in the language of all Jews about everyday Jewish life, Sholem Asch, along with other pioneers of Yiddish literature, sought to preserve a sense of culture and community…

Pauline Rochester Kibbe, Latin Americanist with the Good Neighbor Commission in the 1940s, was born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1909. She and her husband had two children. In 1939 she…

Groundbreaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers…

Best known for his novels and essays steeped in his love of the American West, Wallace Stegner received the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1946 for One Nation, for which he wrote…

Winner of the 1944 Governor General’s Literary Award For Fiction. Earth and High Heaven is, simply, a drama of human relationships—of two people in love who are confronted by the…

Recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1945 for his groundbreaking work, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Gunnar Myrdal was a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose influence extended…

Ottley grew up in New York City and went to St. Bonaventure University in western New York state in 1926. He was one of the first blacks to go there, and was recruited to run track, at…

In this book, Maurice Samuel tells of a pilgrimage through Sholom Aleichem’s world, visiting the townlets and villages of the famous Pale of Settlement, recounting the adventures of the chief…

“I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it….

Leopold Infeld was a Polish physicist who worked mainly in Poland and Canada. He was a Rockefeller fellow at Cambridge University and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences….

Leyburn provides a connected story of the growth of Haiti’s social institutions out of the backgrounds of slavery and French colonial life and the slow shaping of these institutions through…

Louis Adamic was a Slovenian American author and translator. In his early school years he joined a secret students’ political club associated with the Yugoslav Nationalistic Movement that had recently…

Howard University Professor E. Franklin Frazier’s 1939 book, The Negro Family in the United States, was the first comprehensive study of the family life of African Americans, beginning with colonial-era…

Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-1971) was among the most prominent sociologists, diplomats, civil rights and peace activists of the 20th century. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, but moved to California…

Charles Spurgeon Johnson was a sociologist and activist who, along with W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier (the first recipient of the John Anisfield Prize), is considered one of…

By the 1930s, hereditarianism—the theory that heredity was the basis for differences in intelligence and behavior—began to fall out of favor. To counter the rise of Nazism and its racist…

Harold Foote Gosnell was a student and close associate of the politician and political scientist Charles E. Merriam. As a professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Political Science,…