Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Black: A Celebration of a Culture

by Deborah Willis

A celebration of African-American culture, vividly captured in more than 500 stunning photographs. Black, A Celebration of a Culture , presents the vibrant panorama of 20th-century black culture in America and around the world in more than 500 photographs from the turn of the last century to the present day. Each photograph, hand-picked by Deborah Willis, America's leading historian of African-American... (more)

Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (Critical Studies on Black Life and Culture)

Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (Critical Studies on Black Life and Culture)

Exploring the scope, diversity, and vitality of black culture, here is a fascinating collection of more than sixty articles from some of the most perceptive and authoritative commentators upon the black experience--Zora Neale Hurston, J. Mason Brewer, Sterling A. Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Willis Laurence James, John Lovell Jr., Langston Hughes, Charles W. Chesnutt, Alan Lomax, Ralph Ellison, A. Philip... (more)

America's Musical Life: A History

by Richard Crawford

"A superb, all-encompassing survey of music in America." — Kirkus Reviews When it comes to American music, America's Musical Life is "the best one-volume history yet on the subject for musicians and enthusiasts, professional or amateur" ( Kirkus Reviews ). "Well-researched and sensitively constructed" ( Library Journal ) and "a book that welcomes the reader, who is happy to keep returning for more" ( Music... (more)

Blues People: Negro Music in White America

Blues People: Negro Music in White America

by Imamu Amiri Baraka

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... <If> the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So... (more)

Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War

Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War

by Melvin Patrick Ely

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE A New York Times Book Review and Atlantic Monthly Editors' Choice Thomas Jefferson denied that whites and freed blacks could live together in harmony. His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African Americans to prove Jefferson wrong. Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed,... (more)

African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950

African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950

African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950 provides important new information about African American culture, social life, and religion, as well as economics, federal policy, migration, and civil rights. The essays particularly emphasize the efforts of African Americans to negotiate the white world in the southern countryside. Filling a void in southern studies, this outstanding collection provides a... (more)

Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (2d ed.) (Music in American Life)

Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (2d ed.) (Music in American Life)

by Norm Cohen

"Impeccable scholarship and lavish illustration mark this landmark study of American railroad folksong. Norm Cohen provides a sweeping discussion of the human aspects of railroad history, railroad folklore, and the evolution of the American folksong. The heart of the book is a detailed analysis of eighty-five songs, from "John Henry" and "The Wabash Cannonball" to "Hell-Bound Train" and "Casey Jones," with their... (more)

Hottest Water in Chicago: Essays on Family, Race, Time and American CultureGayle Pemberton

Hottest Water in Chicago: Essays on Family, Race, Time and American Culture

by Gayle Pemberton

This is a book of essays on art and literature that also provide revealing glimpses into the life and family of one black baby boomer. They are as interesting as anything Maya Angelou has written but present a whole different experience. Pemberton came from a middle-class background, with an intact and loving family. Her father was an Urban League official, and the family moved several times: she lived in Chicago,... (more)

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Tags: african-american culture