New Releases by Henry Louis Gates

Based on PBS television series Faces of America hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Traces the roles that Wheatley and Jefferson played in the shaping of African-American literary tradition, discussing Wheatley''s rise to fame and Jefferson''s disputed role as the father of the black freedom struggle.

Unlike most white Americans who, if they are so inclined, can search their ancestral records, identifying who among their forebears was the first to set foot on this country’s shores, most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying black men and women even their names. Yet, from that legacy of slavery, there have sprung generations who’ve struggled, thrived, and lived extraordinary lives. For too long, African Americans’ family trees have been barren of branches, but, very recently, advanced genetic testing techniques, combined with archival research, have begun to fill in the gaps. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes nineteen extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through U.S. history and back to Africa. Those whose recovered pasts collectively form an African American “people’s history” of the United States include celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, and Quincy Jones; writers such as Maya Angelou and Bliss Broyard; leading thinkers such as Harvard divinity professor Peter Gomes, the Reverend T. D. Jakes, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot; and famous achievers such as astronaut Mae Jemison, media personality Tom Joyner, decathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Ebony and Jet publisher Linda Johnson Rice. More than a work of history, In Search of Our Roots is a book of revelatory importance that, for the first time, brings to light the lives of ordinary men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a path for their famous descendants. For a reader, there is the stirring pleasure of witnessing long-forgotten struggles and triumphs–but there’s an enduring reward as well. In accompanying the nineteen contemporary achievers on their journey into the past and meeting their remarkable forebears, we come to know ourselves.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. DuBois''s sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois is a collection of Du Bois''s works in 19 volumes. Each work is introduced by a brief essay by an eminent scholar and each volume includes a general introduction from the series editor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Spanning over a half-century, this collection is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

Presents an annotated version of Harriet Beecher Stowe''s classic novel "Uncle Tom''s Cabin" that describes the lives of slaves and abolitionists in the 1800s, historical discussions of the Underground Railroad, slave trade, and plantation life, and advertisements that were influenced by the novel.

Three years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman''s Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina, which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever found, and possibly the first novel written by a black women anywhere. The Bondwoman''s Narrative was published in 2002. In Search of Hannah Crafts now brings together twenty-two authorities on African-American studies to examine such issues as authenticity, and the history and criticism of this unique novel, including Nina Baym, Jean Fagan Yellin, William Andrews, Lawrence Buell, Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Shelley Fisher-Fishkin.The Bondwoman''s Narrative will take its place in the African-American canon, and In Search of Hannah Crafts is the book that scholars and students of African-American Studies, of women writers, and of slavery, need to have to understand this unprecedented historical and literary event.

African American Lives offers up-to-date, authoritative biographies of some 600 noteworthy African Americans. These 1,000-3,000 word biographies, selected from over five thousand entries in the forthcoming eight-volume African American National Biography, illuminate African-American history through the immediacy of individual experience. From Esteban, the earliest known African to set foot in North America in 1528, right up to the continuing careers of Venus and Serena Williams, these stories of the renowned and the near forgotten give us a new view of American history. Our past is revealed from personal perspectives that in turn inspire, move, entertain, and even infuriate the reader. Subjects include slaves and abolitionists, writers, politicians, and business people, musicians and dancers, artists and athletes, victims of injustice and the lawyers, journalists, and civil rights leaders who gave them a voice. Their experiences and accomplishments combine to expose the complexity of race as an overriding issue in America''s past and present. African American Lives features frequent cross-references among related entries, over 300 illustrations, and a general index, supplemented by indexes organized by chronology, occupation or area of renown, and winners of particular honors such as the Spingarn Medal, Nobel Prize, and Pulitzer Prize.

Annotation The concept "leave no child behind" has become popularly associated with the Bush administration''s education plan, but Comer contends that it actually diverges greatly from the ideals of the Children''s Defense Fund, which originated the concept.

Welcomed on publication as "brilliant, definitive, and a joy to teach from," The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was adopted at more than 1,275 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, the new Second Edition offers these highlights.

A novel written in the 1850s by a runaway slave follows a young slave from a North Carolina plantation as she flees to the North and, after being pursued by slave hunters and forced to serve a difficult new mistress, finally obtains freedom in New Jersey.

An illustrated, decade-by-decade collection of biological profiles of significant African-Americans, from W.E.B. DuBois to Tiger Woods.

This collection of landmark slave narratives demonstrates how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition No literary genre speaks as directly and as eloquently to the brutal contradictions in American history as the slave narrative. The works collected in this volume present unflinching portrayals of the cruelty and degradation of slavery while testifying to the African-American struggle for freedom and dignity. They demonstrate the power of the written word to affirm a person’s—and a people’s—humanity in a society poisoned by racism. Slave Narratives shows how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and, through their expression of anger, pain, sorrow, and courage, laid the foundations of the African-American literary tradition. This volume collects ten works published between 1772 and 1864: • Narratives by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772) and Olaudah Equiano (1789) recount how they were taken from Africa as children and brought across the Atlantic to British North America. • The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) provides unique insight into the man who led the deadliest slave uprising in American history. • The widely read narratives by the fugitive slaves Frederick Douglass (1845), William Wells Brown (1847), and Henry Bibb (1849) strengthened the abolitionist cause by exposing the hypocrisies inherent in a slaveholding society ostensibly dedicated to liberty and Christian morality. • The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) describes slavery in the North while expressing the eloquent fervor of a dedicated woman. • Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) tells the story of William and Ellen Craft’s subversive and ingenious escape from Georgia to Philadelphia. • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is Harriet Jacobs’s complex and moving story of her prolonged resistance to sexual and racial oppression. • The narrative of the “trickster” Jacob Green (1864) presents a disturbing story full of wild humor and intense cruelty. Together, these works fuse memory, advocacy, and defiance into a searing collective portrait of American life before emancipation. Slave Narratives contains a chronology of events in the history of slavery, as well as biographical and explanatory notes and an essay on the texts.

William Wells Brown, Frances E.W. Harper, and Charles W. Chesnutt, three black writers who bore witness to the experience of their people under slavery, create a portrait of black life in the 19th century in these three novels. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Offers an illustrated journey through the history and contributions of Africa''s lost civilizations, from the ancient pyramids of Nubia to the ruins of Ethiopia''s Christian kingdom to the great library and university of Timbuktu.

"This is a book of stories," writes Henry Louis Gates, "and all might be described as ''narratives of ascent.''" As some remarkable men talk about their lives, many perspectives on race and gender emerge. For the notion of the unitary black man, Gates argues, is as imaginary as the creature that the poet Wallace Stevens conjured in his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." James Baldwin, Colin Powell, Harry Belafonte, Bill T. Jones, Louis Farrakhan, Anatole Broyard, Albert Murray -- all these men came from modest circumstances and all achieved preeminence. They are people, Gates writes, "who have shaped the world as much as they were shaped by it, who gave as good as they got." Three are writers -- James Baldwin, who was once regarded as the intellectual spokesman for the black community; Anatole Broyard, who chose to hide his black heritage so as to be seen as a writer on his own terms; and Albert Murray, who rose to the pinnacle of literary criticism. There is the general-turned-political-figure Colin Powell, who discusses his interactions with three United States presidents; there is Harry Belafonte, the entertainer whose career has been distinct from his fervent activism; there is Bill T. Jones, dancer and choreographer, whose fierce courage and creativity have continued in the shadow of AIDS; and there is Louis Farrakhan, the controversial religious leader. These men and others speak of their lives with candor and intimacy, and what emerges from this portfolio of influential men is a strikingly varied and profound set of ideas about what it means to be a black man in America today.

Profiles forty-five lithographs by Paul Colin which portray the uproar African-Americans created in music and dance in Paris after World War I.

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation. A winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection, a work that extends and deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling

A provocative anthology on questions of hate speech and speech regulation designed to protect minorities At the University of Pennsylvania, a student is reprimanded for calling a group of African-American students water buffalo. Several prominent American law schools now request that professors abstain from discussing the legal aspects of rape for fear of offending students. As debates over multiculturalism and political correctness crisscross the land, no single issue has been more of a flash point in the ongoing culture wars than hate speech codes, which seek to restrict bigoted or offensive speech and punish those who engage in it. In this provocative anthology, a range of prominent voices argue that hate speech restrictions are not only dangerous, but counterproductive. The lessons of history indicate that speech regulation designed to protect minorities is destined to be used against them. Acknowledging the legitimacy of the concerns that prompt speech codes and combining support for civil liberties with an acute concern for civil tights issues, Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex demonstrates that it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw the line between unprotected insults and protected ideas. Decrying such speech regulation as overly concerned with the symbols of racism rather than its realities, Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex offers a balanced and well-reasoned perspective on one of the most controversial issues of our time.

Investigates the lives of Southern women during the Civil War. Includes photographs, drawings, and excerpts from letters, diaries, personal narratives, and newspaper articles.

Multiculturalism. It has been the subject of cover stories in Time and Newsweek, as well as numerous articles in newspapers and magazines around America. It has sparked heated jeremiads by George Will, Dinesh D''Sousa, and Roger Kimball. It moved William F. Buckley to rail against Stanley Fish and Catherine Stimpson on "Firing Line." It is arguably the most hotly debated topic in America today--and justly so. For whether one speaks of tensions between Hasidim and African-Americans in Crown Heights, or violent mass protests against Moscow in ethnic republics such as Armenia, or outright war between Serbs and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, it is clear that the clash of cultures is a worldwide problem, deeply felt, passionately expressed, always on the verge of violent explosion. Problems of this magnitude inevitably frame the discussion of "multiculturalism" and "cultural diversity" in the American classroom as well. In Loose Canons, one of America''s leading literary and cultural critics, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offers a broad, illuminating look at this highly contentious issue. Gates agrees that our world is deeply divided by nationalism, racism, and sexism, and argues that the only way to transcend these divisions--to forge a civic culture that respects both differences and similarities--is through education that respects both the diversity and commonalities of human culture. His is a plea for cultural and intercultural understanding. (You can''t understand the world, he observes, if you exclude 90 percent of the world''s cultural heritage.) We feel his ideas most strongly voiced in the concluding essay in the volume, "Trading on the Margin." Avoiding the stridency of both the Right and the Left, Gates concludes that the society we have made simply won''t survive without the values of tolerance, and cultural tolerance comes to nothing without cultural understanding. Henry Louis Gates is one of the most visible and outspoken figures on the academic scene, the subject of a cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and a major profile in The Boston Globe, and a much sought-after commentator. And as one of America''s foremost advocates of African-American Studies (he is head of the department at Harvard), he has reflected upon the varied meanings of multiculturalism throughout his professional career, long before it became a national controversy. What we find in these pages, then, is the fruit of years of reflection on culture, racism, and the "American identity," and a deep commitment to broadening the literary and cultural horizons of all Americans.

This collection from the rich literature of African American autobiography documents the experience of being black in America, from slavery to present day, in the words of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and forty other contributors.

"Four years in the making, Facing History was organized by Guy C. McElroy, Jr., for The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition documents the ways in which artists have created a complicated and often ambivalent visual record of African Americans that has reinforced, and sometimes opposed, a variety of stereotypes of black identity. It also demonstrates how social and cultural attitudes, as well as the historic events of the times, affected artists'' representations of black society. The exhibition includes more than 100 paintings, sculptures, and drawings by over 60 artists. Among the African-American artists included are Joshua Johnson, Robert S. Duncanson, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Mary Edmonia Lewis, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., and Jacob Lawrence. Paintings by John Singleton Copley, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, Robert Henri, Charles Demuth, Reginald Marsh, and Ben Shahn are also exhibited"--Brooklyn Museum website, viewed January 3, 2023.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.''s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition''s theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston''s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison''s Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed''s Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. The second volume in an enterprising trilogy on African-American literature, The Signifying Monkey--which expands the arguments of Figures in Black--makes an important contribution to literary theory, African-American literature, folklore, and literary history.

"The originality, brilliance, and scope of the work is remarkable.... Gates will instruct, delight, and stimulate a broad range of readers, both those who are already well versed in Afro-American literature, and those who, after reading this book, will eagerly begin to be."--Barbara E. Johnson, Harvard University. "A critical enterprise of the first importance.... Gates promises to lead and to show the way in boldness of conception, in vigor of execution, and in vitality and pertinence of expression."--James Olney, Louisiana State University. Recently awarded Honorable Mention from the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize Committee of the American Studies Association, Figures in Black takes a provocative new look at how we analyze and define black literature. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., attacks the notion that the dominant mode of Afro-American literature is, or should be, a kind of social realism, evaluated primarily as a reflection of the "Black Experience." Instead, Gates insists that critics turn to the language of the text and bring to their work the close, methodical analysis of language made possible by modern literary theory. But his goal in this volume is not merely to "apply" contemporary theory to black texts. Indeed, as he ranges from 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley to modern writers Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker, he attempts to redefine literary criticism itself, moving it away from a Eurocentric notion of a hierarchical canon--mostly white, Western, and male--to foster a truly comparative and pluralisic notion of literature. In doing so, he provides critics with a powerful tool for the analysis of black art and, more important, reveals for all readers the brilliance and depth of the Afro-American tradition.

Product information not available.

The autobiographical narratives of black ex-slaves published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history. Black slaves in the New World created a veritable "literature of escape" depicting the overwhelming horrors of human bondage. These narratives served the abolitionist movement not only as evidence of the slaves'' degradation but also of their "intellectual capacity." Accordingly, this literature has elicited a wealth of analysis- and controversy- from its initial publication right up to our day. This volume charts the response to the black slave''s narrative from 1750 to the present. The book consists of three sections: selected reviews of slave narratives, dating from 1750 to 1861; essays examining how such narratives serve as historical material; and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.