Collection: History

Called "powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, this explosive book of history and cultural criticism reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color.

Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep "ownership" of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women's active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long overdue validation of the experiences of women of color.

Discussing subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the viral BBQ Becky video, and 19th century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race. She shows how the division between innocent white women and racialized, sexualized women of color was created, and why this division is crucial to confront.

Along the way, there are revelatory responses to questions like: Why are white men not troubled by sexual assault on women? (See Christine Blasey Ford.) With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialized within, a reality that we must apprehend in order to fight.

"A stunning and thorough look at White womanhood that should be required reading for anyone who claims to be an intersectional feminist. Hamad's controlled urgency makes the book an illuminating and poignant read. Hamad is a purveyor of such bold thinking, the only question is, are we ready to listen?" --Rosa Boshier, The Washington Post

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity 

Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives.

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. 

A deep exploration of the regenerative and magical secrets of sacred masculinity hidden in familiar myths both ancient and modern

- Reveals the restorative fungi archetype of Osiris, the Orphic mysteries as an underground mycelium linking forests and people, how Dionysus teaches us about invasive species and playful sexuality, and the ecology of Jesus as depicted in his nature-focused parables

- Liberates Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell's hero's journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge

Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legend readily cut down forests, slaughtered the old deities, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, trickster harpists, and vegetal magicians with flowering wands. As eco-feminist scholar Sophie Strand discovered, these wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden in plain sight.

Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths, revealing the beautiful range of the divine masculine, including expressions of male friendship, male intimacy, and male creative collaboration. In discussing Dionysus and Osiris, Strand encourages us to think like an ecosystem instead of like an individual. She connects dying, vegetal gods to the virtuous cycle of composting and decay, highlighting the ways in which mushrooms can restore soil and heal polluted landscapes. Exploring esoteric Christianity, the author celebrates the Gnostic Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, imagining the ecology that the Rabbi Yeshua would have actually been referencing in his nature-focused parables. Strand frees Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell's hero's journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge.

Strand reseeds our minds with new visions of male identity and shows how each of us, regardless of gender, can develop a matured ecological empathy and witness a blossoming of sacred masculine powers that are soft, curious, connective, and celebratory.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a "groundbreaking" (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves--now updated, with a new preface.

"The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind."--The New York Times

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism--and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas--from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities--that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

***An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!***

From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing and personal work to date--a deeply intimate memoir of discovery, found family, and self-acceptance. The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag.

Central to RuPaul's success has been his chameleonic adaptability. From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world's largest television franchises, RuPaul's ever-shifting nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and supermogul. Yet that adaptability has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known.

In The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.

Here in RuPaul's singular and extraordinary story is a manual for living--a personal philosophy that testifies to the value of chosen family, the importance of harnessing what makes you different, and the transformational power of facing yourself fearlessly.

A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity, The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag. "I've always loved to view the world with analytical eyes, examining what lies beneath the surface. Here, the focus is on my own life--as RuPaul Andre Charles," says RuPaul.

If we're all born naked and the rest is drag, then this is RuPaul totally out of drag. This is RuPaul stripped bare.

The lost world of the "gay paradises" in San Francisco and New York is beautifully documented in this collection of remarkably intimate portraits and street scenes taken by photography activist and chronicler Nicholas Blair from 1979-1986. The lovely, carefree utopia pre-AIDS gay communities offered a long-maligned culture evoke a halcyon existence of peace and acceptance, with only a hint of the dark cloud of the AIDS epidemic looming, and early protests and demands for humane treatment just beginning to take hold.

Between 1979 and 1986--after Stonewall and before the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic--there was a period of exuberant and burgeoning gay life in places even then known as "gay paradises." There were others, but the best known were San Francisco's Castro District, New York's Christopher Street and Fire Island, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The joy--and pathos--of these tragically lost worlds is beautifully and vibrantly documented in this collection of compelling portraits and street scenes photographed by Nicholas Blair. As a teenager lured to San Francisco from New York--via hitchhiking to Buenos Aires--Blair lived in a hippie-style arts commune just across town from the Castro. With a Leica rangefinder camera loaned to him by a childhood friend, Blair began honing his craft as a photographer amidst the explosion of LGBTQ life that was rapidly eclipsing the hippies as the most visible (and photographable) counter-culture movement of the day.

Blair's revealing, evocative, and celebratory photos are a window into the outburst of pent-up celebration and (occasionally) riotous ebullience of theretofore closeted persons who had suddenly felt the door of tolerance opening a crack, and who were now leaning in, hard, to live life openly as their true and genuine selves.

Perhaps most ironic, viewed from today's perspective of intersectionality, is how extensively, especially in the San Francisco images, the "hippie" background dovetails with, for example, the vibrant flamboyance of many of those in the Pride Parades. How many degrees of separation are there, really, between Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence?

If the specter of AIDS were not hanging over these photographs, it would be as if they were showing us a parallel universe where full equality under law for LGBTQ people could have come so much sooner.

As they stand, these historic images are time capsules of a few places in America, where, for the very first time, and for a very short while, it was okay to be gay.

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

The Women's House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women's imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City's Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates--Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur--were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women's prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher.

Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition--and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women's House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.

Winner, 2023 Stonewall Book Award--Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award
CrimeReads, Best True Crime Books of the Year

For readers of Saidiya Hartman and Jeanette Winterson, Lesbian Love Story is an intimate journey into the archives--uncovering the romances and role models written out of history and what their stories can teach us all about how to love

When Amelia Possanza moved to Brooklyn to build a life of her own, she found herself surrounded by queer stories: she read them on landmark placards, overheard them on the pool deck when she joined the world's largest LGBTQ swim team, and even watched them on TV in her cockroach-infested apartment. These stories inspired her to seek out lesbians throughout history who could become her role models, in romance and in life.

Centered around seven love stories for the ages, this is Possanza's journey into the archives to recover the personal histories of lesbians in the twentieth century: who they were, how they loved, why their stories were destroyed, and where their memories echo and live on. Possanza's hunt takes readers from a drag king show in Bushwick to the home of activists in Harlem and then across the ocean to Hadrian's Library, where she searches for traces of Sappho in the ruins. Along the way, she discovers her own love--for swimming, for community, for New York City--and adds her record to the archive.

At the heart of this riveting, inventive history, Possanza asks: How could lesbian love help us reimagine care and community? What would our world look like if we replaced its foundation of misogyny with something new, with something distinctly lesbian?

A detailed guide to surviving history's most challenging threats, from outrunning dinosaurs to making it off the Titanic alive

History is the most dangerous place on earth. From dinosaurs the size of locomotives to meteors big enough to sterilize the planet, from famines to pandemics, from tornadoes to the Chicxulub asteroid, the odds of human survival are slim but not zero--at least, not if you know where to go and what to do.

In each chapter of How to Survive History, Cody Cassidy explores how to survive one of history's greatest threats: getting eaten by dinosaurs, being destroyed by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, succumbing to the lava flows of Pompeii, being devoured by the Donner Party, drowning during the sinking of the Titanic, falling prey to the Black Death, and more. Using hindsight and modern science to estimate everything from how fast you'd need to run to outpace a T. rex to the advantages of different body types in surviving the Donner Party tragedy, Cassidy gives you a detailed battle plan for survival, helping you learn about the era at the same time.

History may be the most dangerous place on earth, but that doesn't mean you can't visit. You can, and you should. And with a copy of How to Survive History in your back pocket, you just might make it out alive.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War--a simmering crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.

One of Time's Most Anticipated Books of the Year

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln's election and the Confederacy's shelling of Sumter--a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were "so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them."

At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter's commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between them. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous secretary of state, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable--one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.

Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink--a dark reminder that we often don't see a cataclysm coming until it's too late.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of All Boys Aren't Blue comes an empowering set of essays about Black and Queer icons from the Harlem Renaissance.

In Flamboyants, George M. Johnson celebrates writers, performers, and activists from 1920s Black America whose sexualities have been obscured throughout history. Through 14 essays, Johnson reveals how American culture has been shaped by icons who are both Black and Queer - and whose stories deserve to be celebrated in their entirety.

Interspersed with personal narrative, powerful poetry, and illustrations by award-winning illustrator Charly Palmer, Flamboyants looks to the past for understanding as to how Black and Queer culture has defined the present and will continue to impact the future. With candid prose and an unflinching lens towards truth and hope, George M. Johnson brings young adult readers an inspiring collection of biographies that will encourage teens today to be unabashed in their layered identities.

Widely heralded as a "masterful" (Washington Post) and "essential" (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation" (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, "virtually indispensable" study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.

***INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER***

Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.

What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine-level pace -- feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit.

In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us.

Rest Is Resistance is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey's lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art, Rest Is Resistance is a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.

A new translation from the French by Marion Wiesel. Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.

This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

By the bestselling author of Fabulosa! and Outrageous!, this reappraisal of camp across time and in all its glorious forms shows how this inescapable part of popular culture has also played an important role in equality movements as a form of protest or resistance.

The following things have seemed impossibly camp to me at one point or another: a doll whose body acts as a cover for a toilet roll, a peacock chair, a wig being pulled off and flushed down the toilet, a tantrum over wire coat hangers, a toppled-over Christmas tree, a 1950s muscle magazine featuring a photo of a young man dressed as a gladiator, a rat underneath a silver serving platter, and an estate agent wearing tiger face paint.

Fabulously unrestrained and ever-evolving, camp has captured the cultural imagination for at least 150 years. The term possibly derives from the French se camper, meaning to pose in a bold, provocative or exaggerated fashion. Frequently used to define or deride young heterosexual men, the upper classes, Black people, older women and gay men, camp has also played a key role in equality movements.

Paul Baker's highly anticipated reappraisal of camp surveys its touchstones across history and the changing ways that it has been understood. He traces the history of camp from the courts of Louis XIV and trials of Oscar Wilde to the archetypical dandy Beau Brummell and the celebrated playwright Noel Coward; from The Valley of the Dolls, Harlem's drag balls and Brazilian telenovelas through to the modern day divas of Donna Summer, Madonna and Britney Spears.

Celebrating camp as an aesthetic, a sensibility and a way of life, this essential dive into an often-derided phenomenon, shows how camp has been a place of refuge and renewal, of heroism and hedonism, and how it is more powerful than ever.

'Glittering cultural armour for dark times. Paul Baker captures the essentially uncapturable phenomenon making it just knowable for all. My dear, she's on fire!' - Damian Barr, writer and broadcaster

'A snappy guide to an all-conquering aesthetic' Financial Times

From classicist James Romm comes a "striking...fascinating" (Booklist) deep dive into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great's destruction of Thebes--and the saga of the greatest military corps of the time, the Theban Sacred Band, a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.The story of the Sacred Band, an elite 300-man corps recruited from pairs of lovers, highlights a chaotic era of ancient Greek history, four decades marked by battles, ideological disputes, and the rise of vicious strongmen. At stake was freedom, democracy, and the fate of Thebes, at this time the leading power of the Greek world. The tale begins in 379 BC, with a group of Theban patriots sneaking into occupied Thebes. Disguised in women's clothing, they cut down the agents of Sparta, the state that had cowed much of Greece with its military might. To counter the Spartans, this group of patriots would form the Sacred Band, a corps whose history plays out against a backdrop of Theban democracy, of desperate power struggles between leading city-states, and the new prominence of eros, sexual love, in Greek public life. After four decades without a defeat, the Sacred Band was annihilated by the forces of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander in the Battle of Chaeronea--extinguishing Greek liberty for two thousand years. Buried on the battlefield where they fell, they were rediscovered in 1880--some skeletons still in pairs, with arms linked together. From violent combat in city streets to massive clashes on open ground, from ruthless tyrants to bold women who held their era in thrall, The Sacred Band recounts "in fluent, accessible prose" (The Wall Street Journal) the twists and turns of a crucial historical moment: the end of the treasured freedom of ancient Greece.