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First published in 1995, I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Bringing together writings by prominent Black thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee made the case for a tradition of “relational humanism” distinct from the philosophical preoccupations of the West.

Over the past twenty years, however, new scholarly research has uncovered other contributions to the discipline now generally known as “Africana philosophy” that were not included in the original volume. In this revised and expanded edition, Hord and Lee build on the strengths of the earlier anthology while enriching the selection of readings to bring the text into the twenty-first century. In a new introduction, the editors reflect on the key arguments of the book's central thesis, refining them in light of more recent philosophical discourse. This edition includes important new readings by Kwame Gyekye, Oyeronke Oy ewumi­, Paget Henry, Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, Charles Mills, and Tommy Curry, as well as extensive suggestions for further reading.

A young officer’s insightful, detailed and steadfast devotion to the Union Navy—told in his own words. 

On May 18, 1862, Henry Willis Wells wrote a letter to his mother telling her in clear terms, “I am fighting for the Union.” Since August 1861, when he joined the US Navy as a master’s mate he never wavered in his loyalty. He wrote to his family frequently that he considered military service a necessary and patriotic duty, and the career that ensued was a dramatic one, astutely and articulately documented by Wells in more than 200 letters home, leaving an invaluable account of daily life in the Union Navy.

Wells joined the navy shortly after the war began, initially on board the Cambridge, attached to the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, which patrolled the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. He witnessed the Battle of Hampton Roads and the fight between the ironclads CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor. Next, the Cambridge assisted in the blockade of Wilmington, North Carolina. In one instance, the warship chased the schooner J. W. Pindar ashore during her attempt to run the blockade, and Confederate forces captured Henry’s boarding party. After a short prison stay in the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, his Confederate captors paroled Henry. He travelled back to Brookline, and soon thereafter the Navy Department assigned him to the gunboat Ceres, which operated on the sounds and rivers of North Carolina, protecting army positions ashore. Henry was on board during the Confederate attempt to capture Washington, North Carolina. During this April 1863 attack, Henry was instrumental in the town’s defense, commanding a naval battery ashore during the latter part of the fight.

His exceptional service gained him a transfer to a larger warship, the USS Montgomery, again on the blockade of Wilmington. Later the service assigned him to the Gem of the Sea, part of the East Gulf Blockading Squadron. Through his hard work and professionalism, he finally earned his first command. In September 1864, he became the commanding officer of the Rosalie, a sloop used as a tender to the local warships. Later he commanded the schooner Annie, also a tender. At the end of December 1864, however, the Annie suffered a massive explosion, killing all hands, including Wells. He was twenty-three years old when his life and career ended tragically. Wells’s letters document both his considerable achievements and his frustrations. His challenges, triumphs, and disappointments are rendered with candor. I Am Fighting for the Union is a vital and deeply personal account of a momentous chapter in the history of the Civil War and its navies.
 

Discover the visionary legacy of the groundbreaking architect Paul R. Williams, FAIA, one of the most prolific Black architects of the 20th century.

Paul R. Williams (1894–1980), among the first Black members of the American Institute of Architects, was a defining force in shaping the city of Los Angeles and Southern California, yet his impact was undoubtedly global.

Threading together Williams’s biography, social histories of Los Angeles, and transformations in the profession, this richly researched monograph traces his remarkable career against the evolving landscape of Los Angeles and the wider architectural world.

• Presents the first research-driven monograph on preeminent architect Paul R. Williams.
• Features nearly 200 images, including many never-before published drawings, renderings, and archival materials.
• Williams’s expansive oeuvre spans everything from early residential commissions in the 1920s to civic, religious, commercial, and cultural landmarks that came to define Los Angeles’s identity at midcentury.
• Examines the intersection of race, space, and professional practice in twentieth-century American architecture.
• Highlights Williams’s commitment to designing for Black communities and advancing social change through architecture.

Step into the world of a visionary who transformed cities and challenged barriers—this volume invites you to get to know Paul R. Williams and the enduring power of architecture to shape society.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Fisher Museum of Art at the University of Southern California from August 18, 2026, to March 13, 2027, Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 15, 2026, to May 31, 2027, and Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from December 15, 2026, to March 14, 2027.

This study of the Guatemalan legal system during the regimes of two of Latin America’s most repressive dictators reveals the surprising extent to which Maya women used the courts to air their grievances and defend their human rights.

Winner, Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2015

Given Guatemala’s record of human rights abuses, its legal system has often been portrayed as illegitimate and anemic. I Ask for Justice challenges that perception by demonstrating that even though the legal system was not always just, rural Guatemalans considered it a legitimate arbiter of their grievances and an important tool for advancing their agendas. As both a mirror and an instrument of the state, the judicial system simultaneously illuminates the limits of state rule and the state’s ability to co-opt Guatemalans by hearing their voices in court.

Against the backdrop of two of Latin America’s most oppressive regimes—the dictatorships of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931–1944)—David Carey Jr. explores the ways in which indigenous people, women, and the poor used Guatemala’s legal system to manipulate the boundaries between legality and criminality. Using court records that are surprisingly rich in Maya women’s voices, he analyzes how bootleggers, cross-dressers, and other litigants crafted their narratives to defend their human rights. Revealing how nuances of power, gender, ethnicity, class, and morality were constructed and contested, this history of crime and criminality demonstrates how Maya men and women attempted to improve their socioeconomic positions and to press for their rights with strategies that ranged from the pursuit of illicit activities to the deployment of the legal system.

I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome—an exhibition and catalog produced by the Yale University Art Gallery—provided the first comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. Responding to the popular success of the exhibit and catalog, Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson here gather ten additional essays by specialists in art history, history, and papyrology to offer further reflections on women in Roman society based on the material evidence provided by art, archaeology, and ancient literary sources.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Cornelius C. Vermeule, Rolf Winkes, Mary T. Boatwright, Susan Wood, Eve D'Ambra, Andrew Oliver, Diana Delia, and Ann Ellis Hanson. Their essays, illustrated with black-and-white photos of the art under discussion, treat such themes as mothers and sons, marriage and widowhood, aging, adornment, imperial portraiture, and patronage.

Louis Moore draws on the life stories of African American fighters active from 1880 to 1915 to explore working-class black manhood. As he details, boxers bought into American ideas about masculinity and free enterprise to prove their equality while using their bodies to become self-made men. The African American middle class, meanwhile, grappled with an expression of public black maleness they saw related to disreputable leisure rather than respectable labor. Moore shows how each fighter conformed to middle-class ideas of masculinity based on his own judgment of what culture would accept. Finally, he argues that African American success in the ring shattered the myth of black inferiority despite media and government efforts to defend white privilege.

In I Know That You Know That I Know, Butte explores how stories narrate human consciousness. Butte locates a historical shift in the representation of webs of consciousnesses in narrative—what he calls “deep intersubjectivity”—and examines the effect this shift has since had on Western literature and culture. The author studies narrative practices in two ways: one pairing eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British novels (Moll Flanders and Great Expectations, for example), and the other studying genre practices—comedy, anti-comedy and masquerade—in written and film narratives (Jane Austen and His Girl Friday, for example, and Hitchcock’s Cary Grant films).

Butte’s second major claim argues for new ways to read representations of human consciousness, whether or not they take the form of deep intersubjectivity. Phenomenological criticism has lost its credibility in recent years, but this book identifies better reading strategies arising out of what the author calls poststructuralist phenomenology, grounded largely in the work of the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. Butte criticizes the extreme of transcendental idealism (first-wave phenomenological criticism) and cultural materialism (when it rules out the study of consciousness). He also criticizes the dominant Lacanian framework of much academic film criticism.

One man's life unfolds into a memoir of the defining cultural figures of the mid-twentieth century and beyond.

I Never Made Love with James Baldwin is a dazzling memoir told through a succession of attorney Stanley Cohen's vivid encounters with some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century and beyond. Moving between America, Europe, and Asia, Cohen recounts moments shared with artists, writers, jurists, and financiers, including Alexander Calder, Joseph Heller, Robert Caro, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yehuda Hanani, and members of the Rothschild family. These figures appear not as distant icons but as sharp, human presences—brilliant, eccentric, generous, and flawed. Cohen’s life unfolds like a performance, shaped less by planning than by intensity: conversations, friendships, arguments, and coincidences that flare briefly and leave lasting marks. With wit, candor, and an eye for the telling detail, he captures a vast social and creative network spanning the mid-twentieth century to the present. The result is an intimate, unconventional portrait of an exceptional life and of the people who lit its path.

An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic.

As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan himself, the film uses Dylan’s music as a score, a triumph for famed queer filmmaker Todd Haynes after encountering issues with copyright in previous projects.

Noah Tsika eloquently characterizes all the ways that Dylan and Haynes harmonize in their methods and sensibilities, interpreting the rule-breaking film as a biography that refuses chronology, disdains factual accuracy, flirts with libel, and cannibalizes Western cinema. Fitting the film’s inspiration, creation, and reception alongside its continuing afterlife, Tsika examines Dylan’s music in the film through the context of intellectual property, raising questions about who owns artistic material and artistic identities and how such material can be reused and repurposed. Tsika’s adventurous analysis touches on gender, race, queerness, celebrity, popular culture, and the law, while offering much to Haynes and Dylan fans alike.