Library of America

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

This collection of 80 dramatic firsthand writings by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and others brings to life the struggle for racial justice from the Civil War to World War. A vital resource for the teaching of the history of race in America that traces the ascendency of white supremacy after Reconstruction -- and the outspoken resistance to it led by Black Americans and their allies. W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line"...

"In the 1970s, feminist authors created a new mode of science fiction in defiance of the "baboon patriarchy"--Ursula K. Le Guin's words--that had long dominated the genre, imagining futures that are still visionary. In this sequel to her groundbreaking 2018 anthology The Future is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek opens a time portal to the decade when women changed science...

"For too long, African Americans have been left out of the story of the nation's founding, their voices absent from the memory and celebration of the creation of the American republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era--by far the richest and most expansive anthology of its kind ever assembled--restores these voices. The writings gathered here reveal the complexity and dynamism of African American life and culture in the period and show how the principles...