Exhibiting at The Shed through April 16 is The Yanomami Struggle, a collection dedicated to the Yanomami people’s fight against the invasion of their land. The exhibition features paintings and drawings by contemporary Yanomami artists and is narrated through the voice of shaman Davi Kopenawa. Below is an excerpt from…

Jarvis R. Givens chronicles the subversive tradition of Black education in America in his award-winning book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. This excerpt unpacks the complicated narrative of the fugitive slave and its place in both Black collective memory and curricula. The theory of…

Black History Month highlights the importance of recognizing the essential work Black artists do to define — and redefine — culture. In her award-winning book Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, Daphne Brooks unpacks the iconography of Beyoncé’s legendary visual album Lemonade in relation…

October 31st marks John Keats birthday, and it is also the publication date of Susan J. Wolfson’s new book, A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries. We’d like to honor both by sharing Keats’s poem “To Autumn.” As Wolfson says in her commentary, the poem…

We round out our celebration of Black History Month with an excerpt from Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award and a Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year. “Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its…

Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness…

All this month we are celebrating Black History Month with excerpts from some of our recent books. In Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 and a book that Ibram X. Kendi calls “extraordinary,” Mia Bay provides a riveting, character-rich…

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen excerpts from our books that reflect varied aspects of the Black experience. Fittingly, our first excerpt comes from a book about historian and educator Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G…

As we saw with the Ebola outbreak — and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic — a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency…