For the month of February 2015, to coincide with Black History Month, we have lowered the e-book list price of four titles in the University of Illinois Press catalog to $2.99.
Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
In this enlightening study, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.
Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race by Wanda A. Hendricks
Born shortly before the Civil War, activist and reformer Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944) became one of the most prominent educated African American women of her generation. In this first biography of Williams, Wanda A. Hendricks focuses on the critical role geography and social position played in Williams’s life, illustrating how the reform activism of Williams and other black women was bound up with place and space. By highlighting how Williams experienced a set of freedoms in the North that were not imaginable in the South, this biography expands how we understand intellectual possibilities, economic success, and social mobility in post-Reconstruction America. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.
Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution by Barbara Foley
The 1923 publication of Cane established Jean Toomer as a modernist master and one of the key literary figures of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Though critics and biographers alike have praised his artistic experimentation and unflinching eyewitness portraits of Jim Crow violence, few seem to recognize how much Toomer’s interest in class struggle, catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and the post–World War One radical upsurge, situate his masterwork in its immediate historical context. In Jean Toomer, Barbara Foley explores Toomer’s political and intellectual connections with socialism, the New Negro movement, and the project of Young America. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.
Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance Edited by Steven C. Tracy
Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance comprehensively explores the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a creative movement that emerged from the crucible of rigid segregation in Chicago’s “Black Belt” from the 1930s through the 1960s. Heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance of white writers, its participants were invested in political activism and social change as much as literature, art, and aesthetics. The revolutionary writing of this era produced some of the first great accolades for African American literature and set up much of the important writing that came to fruition in the Black Arts Movement. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.
