Summary: "National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Scribner 2016
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.8 FIRCopies Available at Peninsula
1 available in Adult, Call number: 305.896 FIRSummary: "An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives--but not everyone regularly sees...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Ballantine Books 2018
Copies Available at Peninsula
1 available in Adult, Call number: 810.8 EDISummary: "The Girl Group Sound, made famous and unforgettable by acts like The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas, took over the airwaves by capturing the mix of innocence and rebellion emblematic of America in the 1960s. As songs like "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "Then He Kissed Me," and "Be My Baby" rose to number one, Girl Groups cornered the burgeoning post-war market of...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Hachette Books 2023
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Place a hold to request this item.Randall, Alice
Summary: "Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music. Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Black Privilege Publishing/Atria 2024
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Place a hold to request this item.Summary: Delving into a century of genre films that by turns utilized, caricatured, exploited, sidelined, and finally embraced them, this documentary traces the untold history of Black Americans in Hollywood through their connection to the horror genre. Adapting Robin Means Coleman's seminal book, this will present the living and the dead, using new and archival interviews from scholars and creators;...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2021
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1 available in Documentary DVDs, Call number: DVD DOC HORDoonan, Simon
Summary: Paying homage to Lou Reed's groundbreaking album Transformer on its fiftieth anniversary, this first-hand account of the album's impact on the LGBTQIA+ community captures a pivotal moment when those long silenced were finally given a voice.
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Publisher / Publication Date: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2022
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 782.42 DOOQuestlove
Summary: Music Is History combines Questlove's deep musical expertise with his curiosity about history, examining America over the past fifty years.
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Publisher / Publication Date: Abrams Image 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 782.42 QUECopies Available at Peninsula
1 available in Adult, Call number: B QUESTLOVE QUEQuestlove
Summary: Bestselling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past fifty years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song's significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and...
Format: sound recording-nonmusical
Publisher / Publication Date: 2021
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Place a hold to request this item.Horowitz, Joseph
Summary: "A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"-how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonin Dvorák prophesied a "great and noble" school of American classical music based on the searing "negro melodies" he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would found popular...
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Publisher / Publication Date: W. W. Norton & Company 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 780.973 HOREby, Margaret
Summary: "A literary travelogue that ventures deep into the heart of classic Southern literature. As the writer Elif Batuman did for Russian literature in The Possessed, Margaret Eby does for Southern literature in this charming book of literary exploration. From Mississippi (William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Barry Hannah) to Alabama (Harper Lee, Truman Capote) to Georgia (Flannery...
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Publisher / Publication Date: W.W. Norton & Company 2015
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 810 EBYHecimovich, Gregg A.
Summary: "A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr."--
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Publisher / Publication Date: Ecco 2023
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Place a hold to request this item.Wildman, Terry M.
Summary: Terry Wildman writes of a justice long-denied, not only for Native peoples who have suffered the loss of lands, livelihood, and life as the American empire spread across the continent, but also for those who struggle for life and liberty to this very day. Like the prophets of Israel, he seeks to correct our eyesight-to set before us God's vision and God's truth and to expose things that we, the...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Great Thunder Publishing 2011
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 220.6 WILCopies Available at East Bay
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 220.6 WILSummary: The 46th annual edition of the most celebrated literary series in America. Over 60 brilliant stories, poems and essays from dozens of small presses, as selected from 900 presses worldwide by more than 200 distinguished staff contributing editors.
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Publisher / Publication Date: Pushcart Prize Fellowships Inc. 2022
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1 available in Adult Fiction, Call number: FIC PUSSummary: The big bang: At the height of the Roaring Twenties, music scouts armed with cutting-edge recording technology set out across America to capture the unsung voices of everyday folk. Blood and soil: America's poor--cotton field slaves, mine workers, sharecroppers--find freedom through music, creating gospel, protest songs, and Delta blues. Out of the many, the one: Exotic cultures spanning...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2017
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1 available in E-TV DVDs, Call number: DVD E-TV AMESummary: Poets, public figures and members of various communities join series creator Elisa New to engage in close readings of a single American poem. Each episode mixes lively discussion with archival materials, location footage, and vivid animation. The series offers audiences an immersive and accessible experience in reading poems that touch on many aspects of American life, past and present.
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2020
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1 available in E-TV DVDs, Call number: DVD E-TV POEOwens, R. J.
Summary: "The song "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" is personified, describing the Black history and culture that inspired its creation. Written in 1968 by singer James Brown after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, the song became an anthem for the civil rights movement"--
Format: text
Publisher / Publication Date: Sleeping Bear Press 2023
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1 available in Juvenile Easy, Call number: JE OWEFinkelstein, Norman
Summary: "This beautifully written work begins with an overview of the spiritual problematics found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American poetry. Traveling slightly outside of the realm of the contemporary, Finkelstein's discussions of Emerson, Whitman, and Eliot yield to close readings of the works of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Nathaniel...
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Publisher / Publication Date: University of Iowa Press 2010
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 811.54 FINLawrence, Tim
Summary: "As the 1970s gave way to the '80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. [This book] chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city's subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Duke University Press 2016
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 781.5 LAWHill, Mike
Summary: "Before Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, and "Doonesbury," there was Art Buchwald. For more than fifty years, from 1950 to 2006, his Pulitzer Prize-winning column of political satire and biting wit made him one of the most widely read American humorists and a popular player in the Washington of Ethel and Ted Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham. Dean Acheson, former U.S....
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Publisher / Publication Date: Random House 2022
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 921 BUCHWALD, ART HILSummary: A look at the history of the American comedy publication and production company, National Lampoon, from its beginning in the 1970s to 2010. The influence the magazine has had on our culture through turbulent times, morphing into Second City, Saturday Night Live, and the movies, and the stars and sorrows it has produced.
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2016
Copies Available at Woodmere
2 available in Documentary DVDs, Call number: DVD DOC DRUSummary: "In 1915, African American newspaper editor and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter waged a battle against D.W. Griffith's notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which unleashed a fight still raging today about race relations and representation, and the power and influence of Hollywood. Birth of a Movement features commentary from Spike Lee, Reginald...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2017
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in E-TV DVDs, Call number: DVD E-TV BIRFitzgerald, Kiana
Summary: "From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's...
Format: text
Publisher / Publication Date: Running Press 2023
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 782.42 FITSmiley, Jane
Summary: "Essays that show how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford"--
Format: text
Publisher / Publication Date: Heyday 2023
Copies Available at Peninsula
1 available in Adult, Call number: 813 SMICopies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 814 SMIOliver, Mary
Summary: A collection of essays follows the author as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor; her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her; and the responsibility she has inherited from the great thinkers and writers of the past.
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Publisher / Publication Date: Penguin Press 2016