LibGuides: What's New: What's New

Black History Month

Black Firsts : 4,000 Ground-breaking and Pioneering Historical Events

Achievements and accomplishments. Change, progress, and pioneers. Black Firsts : 4,000 Grounding-breaking and Pioneering Events is a testimony to the rich but often overlooked history of black life in America - and throughout the world. It collects and celebrates the thousands of world-moving people, highlighting hard-to-find facts and accomplishments that have helped shape society and culture.

First published in 1994 and updated in 2002, this new addition adds hundreds of new stories and brings you up-to-date. It recognizes and honors both renowned and lesser-known barrier-breaking trailblazers in all fields - arts, entertainment, business, civil rights, education, government, invention, journalism, religion, science, sports, music, and more. This vital collection includes thousands of personal victories and triumphs.

Distinguished scholar Dr. Jessie Carney Smith has devoted much of her research to the history and achievements of African American people. Black Firsts is the culmination of many months of work, courage, and perseverance, the qualities represented within these pages. Revel and rejoice in the hard work accomplished by these men and women who overcame adversity and difficulties.

Civil Rights Queen : Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country.

Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions-how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America.

American Sirens : The Incredible Story of the Black Men who Became America's First Paramedics

Up until 1968, if you suffered a medical crisis, your chances of survival were minimal. That all changed with the Freedom House EMS in Pittsburgh, a group of Black men who became America's first paramedics and set the gold standard for emergency medicine around the world, only to have their legacy erased - until now. Born from the vision of a Nobel Prize-nominated physician, the needs of a country in pain, and the ashes of Pittsburgh's downturn in the 1960s, Freedom House brought together a group of young, uneducated Black men to forge a new frontier in healthcare. Their job was grueling, the rules made up as they went along, and their mandate nearly impossible: prove to a skeptical public and the politicians that paramedics were a noble and valuable endeavor and, most importantly, that they themselves were worthy professionals performing a crucial public service. Despite the long odds and attempts to shut them down, they succeeded spectacularly.

In American Sirens, acclaimed journalist and paramedic Kevin Hazzard tells a dramatic story of heroes and villains, of brutal attempts to stifle hope, and the resilience of a community that fought back. He follows a rich cast of characters that includes John Moon, an orphan who found his calling as a paramedic; Peter Safar, the Nobel Prize-nominated physician who invented CPR and realized his vision for a trained ambulance service; and Nancy Caroline, the idealistic young doctor who turned a scrappy team into an international leader. At every turn, they battled racism - from the community, the police, and the government. Never-before revealed in full, this is a rich and troubling hidden history of the Black origins of America's paramedics, a special band of dedicated essential workers, who stand ready to serve day and night on the line between life and death for every one of us.

Love for Liberation : African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the U.S. and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the optimism and challenges of African independence leaders were publicized to African Americans through community-based newspapers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Inspired by African independence--and frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights reforms in the U.S.--a new generation of Black Power activists embarked on nonviolent direct action campaigns and built alternative institutions designed as spaces of freedom from racial subjugation. Featuring interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue requiring education, sustained collective action, and global solidarity--laying the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Blk Art : The Audacious Legacy of Black Artists and Models in Western Art

A fun and fact-filled introduction to the dismissed Black art masters and models who shook up the world. Elegant. Refined. Exclusionary. Interrupted. The foundations of the fine art world are shaking. Beyoncé and Jay-Z break the internet by blending modern Black culture with fine art in their iconic music video filmed in the Louvre. Kehinde Wiley powerfully subverts European masterworks. Calls resonate for diversity in museums and the resignations of leaders of the old guard. It's clear that modern-day museums can no longer exist without change--and without recognizing that Black people have been a part of the Western art world since its beginnings. Quietly held within museums and private collections around the world are hundreds of faces of Black men and women, many of their stories unknown. From paintings of majestic kings to a portrait of a young girl named Isabella in Amsterdam, these models lived diverse lives while helping shape the art world along the way. Then, after hundreds of years of Black faces cast as only the subject of the white gaze, a small group of trailblazing Black American painters and sculptors reached national and international fame, setting the stage for the flourishing of Black art in the 1920s and beyond. Captivating and informative, Blk Art is an essential work that elevates a globally dismissed legacy to its proper place in the mainstream art canon. From the hushed corridors of royal palaces to the bustling streets of 1920s Paris--this is Black history like never seen before.

New in the Library

Where the Dead Wait by Ally Wilkes
Call Number: PR6123 .I5363 W48 2023
William Day should be an acclaimed Arctic explorer. But after a failed expedition, in which his remaining men only survived by eating their dead comrades, he returned in disgrace.

Thirteen years later, his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same frozen waters. Perhaps this is Day's chance to restore his tarnished reputation by bringing Stevens--the man who's haunted his whole life--back home. But when the rescue mission becomes an uncanny journey into his past, Day must face up to the things he's done.

Abandonment. Betrayal. Cannibalism.

Aboard ship, Day must also contend with unwanted passengers: a reporter obsessively digging up the truth about the first expedition, as well as Stevens's wife, a spirit-medium whose séances both fascinate and frighten. Following a trail of cryptic messages, gaunt bodies, and old bones, their search becomes more and more unnerving. The restless dead are never far behind in this "breathtaking achievement"
My Name Was Eden by Eleanor Barker-White
Call Number: PR6102 .A7637 M9 2024
One twin vanished. The other twin remained. Until now...

When her daughter Eden came home from the hospital, Lucy was profoundly relieved. Eden had survived a drowning incident and had no apparent brain damage, no serious injuries, not even a scratch on her. Lucy fervently welcomed having a second chance at being the good mother she should have been before her teenager's accident.

Until Eden tells her that Eden isn't her name. Until she starts calling herself Eli. The name Lucy had reserved for Eden's unborn twin.

Don't worry, says the doctor. Eden is completely fine, says her husband. Of course I'm fine, Eden says, with that strange new smile of hers. I didn't die. I'm here.

But Lucy knows something's very wrong with Eden. She's not her maddening, complicated teenage girl anymore--this straight-backed, even tempered, steady-eyed child in her house is someone else entirely. Eden, it seems, is the twin who disappeared...
Picture Perfect Autumn by Shelley Noble
Call Number: PS3614 .O253 P53 2023
Dani Campbell is the latest darling of the Manhattan art scene. As a self-taught photographer, Dani is loving every minute of her sudden popularity, but has no idea how she got there, or a clue as to how to stay. On a shoot at an antiques barn, she discovers an envelope of old photos and sees in them what her photos are missing. Her search for their source leads Dani to a small Rhode Island town, a dilapidated American Gothic beach house--and Lawrence Sinclair.

Reclusive and bitter, the last thing eighty-year-old Lawrence wants to think about is photography--the thing that inadvertently led to his son's death and tore his family apart. But Dani is determined and persuasive, and Lawrence can't help but be intrigued by the girl with spiky hair who wants to learn from him, when almost everyone else just wants to relieve him of his substantial fortune.

Dani and Lawrence's mentorship blossoms unexpectedly, but everything is put in jeopardy by the appearance of Lawrence's estranged grandson, Peter. Peter is determined to spend some time reconnecting with his grandfather and to get rid of the supposed fortune hunter after Lawrence's money. But Dani is not what he was expecting, and he soon discovers that they have more things in common than not.

Brought together by fortune, fate, and the ties that bind, all three embark on journeys of discovery and love.
Pelican Girls by Julia Malye
Call Number: PS3613 .A5247 P45 2024
Paris, 1720. La Salpêtrière hospital is in crisis: too many occupants, not enough beds. Halfway across the world, France's colony in the wilds of North America has space to spare and needs families to fill it. So the director of the hospital rounds up nearly a hundred female "volunteers" of childbearing age--orphans, prisoners, and mental patients--to be shipped to New Orleans.

Among this group are three unlikely friends: a sharp-tongued twelve-year old orphan, a mute 'madwoman,' and an accused abortionist. Charlotte, Pétronille, and Geneviève, along with the dozens of other women aboard La Baleine, have no knowledge of what lies ahead and no control over their futures. Strangers brought together by fate, these brave and fierce young women will face extraordinary adversity--pirates, slavedrivers, sickness, war--but also the private trauma of heartbreak and unrequited love, children born and lost, cruelty and unexpected pleasure, and a friendship forged in fire that will sustain through the years.
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Call Number: PS3608 .A783854 S73 2023
Opal is a lot of things--orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier--but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors--and her home. Everyone agrees that it's best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House--and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund--she can't resist.

But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur's own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

Traffic by Ben Smith
Call Number: PN4867.2 .S65 2023
The origin story of the Age of Disinformation: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and Buzzfeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale in the first two decades of the 21st century helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society. If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the impact of climate change.

The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000's, in that brief moment after the first dotcom crash and before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City rather than Silicon Valley might become tech's center of gravity. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier crew at HuffPost and Buzzfeed were building the foundations of click-bait media. It was tech's age of innocence: the old establishment might have been discredited by the Iraq War, but digital news would facilitate the spread of truth. Progressive activists were first to the scene, and for a while it seemed they were the scene. After all, didn't they get Barack Obama elected? Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, was either there or talked to everyone who was, and in his trademark fashion, he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity scored with dark wit, sparing no one--and certainly not himself. Denton and Gawker were seen at the time as the black hats, but in Smith's hands the story is much more nuanced: yes, Denton's ideology of radical transparency was problematic, but at least he had an ideology.

Jonah Peretti survived long after Denton's Gawker perished because his focus on clicks was relentlessly content-agnostic. But as with the proverbial sorcerer's apprentice, unintended consequences began to gain momentum. At the heart of Traffic is one of the great ironies of our time: the internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. As Smith and his colleagues and rivals thought they were inventing digital media, other figures, flickering around the margins of their story, had different designs. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart and Gavin McInnes and Chris Poole, the creator of 4chan, all seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick and Jonah and crew were the stars. By 2020, any reasonable observer might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case. To understand how we got here, "Traffic" is essential and enthralling reading.
A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth by James Tejani
Call Number: HE554.L7 T45 2024
The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, historian James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port's rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary--and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic's destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific.

In a narrative spanning decades and stretching to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia, Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation's future. It was not virgin land, but dominated by powerful Mexican estates that would not be dislodged easily. Yet American scientists, including the great surveyor George Davidson, imperialist politicians such as Jefferson Davis and William Gwin, and hopeful land speculators, among them the future Union Army general Edward Ord, would wrest control of the estuary, and set the scene for the violence, inequality, and engineering marvels to come. San Pedro was no place for a harbor, Tejani reveals. The port was carved in defiance of nature, using new engineering techniques and massive mechanical dredgers. Business titans such as Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman brought their money and corporate influence to the task. But they were outmatched by government reformers, laying the foundations for the port, for the modern city of Los Angeles, and for our globalized world. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A story of imperial dreams and personal ambition, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is necessary reading for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be.
I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel J. Levitin
Call Number: ML3920 .L465 2024
Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals how the deep connections between music and the human brain can be harnessed for healing. Music is perhaps one of humanity's oldest medicines as well as its most universal: from China to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and pre-colonial South America, cultures have developed rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, spur healing, and calm the mind. Despite this history, musical therapy has long been considered the remit of ancient practice and alternative medicine, if not outright quackery and pseudoscience. In the last decade, however, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has emerged that persuasively argues music can offer profoundly effective treatment for a whole host of ailments, from Alzheimer's to PTSD, depression, pain, and cognitive injury. It is, in short, one of the most potent and remarkably promising new therapies available today. A work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and joyful celebration of the human mind, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord explores the critical role music has played in human evolution, illuminating how the story of the human brain is inseparable from the creative enterprise of music that has bound cultures together throughout history. Music insinuates itself into our earliest memories; it is intimately connected to our emotional regulation and cognition; its shared rhythms and sounds are essential to our social behaviors. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin demonstrates in this mind-expanding follow-up to This Is Your Brain on Music--which revolutionized our understanding of the neuroscience of song--medical researchers are now finding that these same deep connections can be harnessed to create profound benefits for those both young and old.
Paradise of the Damned by Keith Thomson
Call Number: E129 .R2 T46 2024
As early as 1530, reports of El Dorado, a city of gold in the South American interior, beckoned to European explorers. Whether there was any truth to the stories remained to be seen, but the allure of unimaginable riches was enough to ensnare dozens of would-be heroes and glory hounds in the desperate hunt. Among them was Sir Walter Raleigh: ambitious courtier, confidant to Queen Elizabeth, and, before long, El Dorado fanatic. Entering the Elizabethan court as an upstart from a family whose days of nobility were far behind them, Raleigh used his military acumen, good looks, and sheer audacity to scramble into the limelight. Yet that same swagger proved to be his undoing, as his secret marriage to a lady-in-waiting enraged Queen Elizabeth and landed him in the Tower of London. Between his ensuing grim prospects at court and his underlying lust for adventure, the legend of El Dorado became an unwavering siren song that hypnotized Raleigh. On securing his release, he journeyed across an ocean to find the fabled city, gambling his painstakingly acquired wealth, hard-won domestic bliss, and his very life. What awaited him in the so-called New World were endless miles of hot, dense jungle packed with deadly flora and fauna, warring Spanish conquistadors and Indigenous civilizations, and other unforeseen dangers. Meanwhile, back at home, his multitude of rivals plotted his demise. Paradise of the Damned, like Keith Thomson's critically acclaimed Born to Be Hanged, brings this story to life in lush and captivating detail. The book charts Raleigh's obsessive search for El Dorado--as well as the many doomed expeditions that preceded and accompanied his--providing not only an invaluable history but also a gripping narrative of traveling to the ends of the earth only to realize, too late, that what lies at home is the greatest treasure of all.
The Black Box by Henry Louis Gates
Call Number: E185.625 .G38 2024
A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison--these writers used words to create a livable world--a "home"--for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society. It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history's most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of--and resisted confinement in--the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation's founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

Black Girls Must Be Magic by Jayne Allen
Call Number: PS3601 .L419 B57 2022
Discovering she's pregnant--after she was told she may not be able to have biological children--Tabitha throws herself headfirst into the world of "single mothers by choice." When an unexpected turn of events draws Marc--her on and off-again ex-boyfriend--back into her world with surprising demands, and the situation at work begins to threaten her livelihood and her identity, Tabitha must make some tough decisions. It takes a village to raise a child, and Tabitha turns to the women who have always been there for her. Will she harness the bravery, strength, and self-love she'll need to keep "the village" together, find her voice at work, and settle things with Marc before the baby arrives?
Wade in the Water by Nyani Nkrumah
Call Number: PS3614 .K76 W33 2023
"Wade in the Water" tells the story of an unforgettable summer in 1982 seen largely through the eyes of Ella, a young, mistreated, Black eleven-year-old girl who lives with Leroy, who resents her, and Ma, who cannot stand to look at her. Ella's world is changed when Katherine St. James, a mysterious white researcher from Princeton, arrives in their racially divided Mississippi town. The community is immediately suspicious - what does Katherine want, and why is she really there? As tensions mount and rumors swirl, and the tide swings against her, Ella and Katherine are drawn into a complicated friendship that silences the outside world... until it doesn't. Soon, the relationship grows increasingly fraught as Ella unwittingly pushes against Katherine's carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, with secrets that could have devastating consequences. Told in the lyrical voices of both Ella and Katherine St. James, this moving coming-of-age story, replete with heartache and love, cruelty and laughter, is an exquisite and explosive novel that will keep you spellbound until the last page.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Call Number: PS3623 .A7323 S56 2017
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high. Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Call Number: PS3613 .C28 H43 2023
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community--heaven and earth--that sustain us.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
Call Number: PR9265.9 .J358 D37 2019
Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy's scent -- from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers -- he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.