Find Books in the SEC Library and beyond

In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States.

National Book Award Winner, Nonfiction, 2021.
Massachusetts Book Awards Winner (Nonfiction), 2022.
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction, 2022
Frederick Douglass Prize, 2022

An autobiography of the Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled and edited from articles, essays, speeches, sermons, letters, and other sources, examining his private and public life and describing his involvement in many important events in the civil rights movement.

Presents eleven of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most famous speeches, with introductions written by individuals such as Rosa Parks, the Dalai Lama, and Ted Kennedy.

Founding Director Lonnie Bunch's inside story of how the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture was created. By turns inspiring, funny, frustrating, quixotic, and bittersweet, this is his deeply personal tale of the challenges and rewards of bringing a nationally acclaimed new institution to life,

An acclaimed historian's definitive biography of the most important African-American figure of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass, who was to his century what Martin Luther King, Jr. was to the 20th century.

New York Times Best Seller List.
ALA Black Caucus Award, 2017 (Nonfiction)
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, 2017 Nonfiction

National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, 2021

Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, 2010
Wellcome Trust Book Prize, 2010

In this collection of essays, noted scholar and activist Vincent Harding reflects on the forgotten legacy of Martin Luther King, and the meaning of his life today.

This memoir of the renowned astrophysicist tells the story of how he overcame his personal demons, including an impoverished childhood and life of crime as well as an addiction to crack cocaine and entrenched racism.

A definitive selection of Audre Lorde's "intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

This collection of sermons by the American civil rights leader explains his convictions about the conditions and problems of contemporary society.

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, 2021 Nonfiction

Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 2011.
National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, 2010.

In 1739 Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest seeking answers to a pressing question: What was the cause of Africans' black skin? Published here for the first time and translated into English, these early documents of scientific racism lay bare the Enlightenment origins of the phantom of racial hierarchy.