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 “A history of the United States that is almost incredible.” —Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps Modernes

Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. by Stetson Kennedy is a bold exposé of America’s institutionalized racism, originally published in 1959 and hailed as a landmark in civil rights literature. With unflinching clarity, Kennedy documents the laws, customs, and social codes that relegated nonwhite citizens to second-class status under the Jim Crow system. From the mistreatment of Native Americans to the exclusionary immigration policies targeting Asians and Africans, the book maps the presence of race-based politics across every facet of American life—housing, education, employment, and even burial. 

What makes this work especially influential is its international resonance. The famed French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre championed the book’s publication in Europe, recognizing its power to illuminate the contradictions between American democratic ideals and racial realities. Sartre’s endorsement helped position the book as a global indictment of racial injustice, aligning it with anti-colonial and human rights movements worldwide. Provocative, meticulously researched, and deeply human, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. remains a vital historical document and a call to conscience. It is not merely a guide—it is a mirror held up to a nation, reflecting truths that later generations were called on to address.

Although Langston, who died in 1897, was a black Politician, orator, lawyer, intellectual, diplomat, and congressman, he has never before been accorded fullscale biographical treatment. Born free on a Virginia plantation, Langston graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, gained admission to the Ohio bar, and by the age of twenty-five, became the first black American to hold elective office. Still in the years of his political apprenticeship, he promoted black civil rights, helped shape the nascent Republican party, aided in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid, and recruited black soldier for the Union cause. In 1864 he became the first president of the National Equal Rights League.

From an extensive search of primary sources, the authors construct a richly textured picture of the beginnings of Langston's career as a national black leader. More than a biography, the work also incorporates social and political history. Embedded firmly in a study of northern black community life and activism, it reveals the degree to which Langston and his cohorts set the terms of the fight for freedom and citizenship.

If the 1930s was the Swing Era, then the years from 1937 on might well be called the Jump Era. That summer Count Basie recorded “Jumping at the Woodside,” and suddenly jump tunes seemed to be everywhere. Along with the bouncy beat came a new dance step—the high-flying aerials of the jitterbuggers—and the basketball games that took place in the dance halls of African America became faster, higher, and flashier. Duke Ellington and a cast of hundreds put the buoyant spirit of the era on stage with their 1941 musical revue, Jump for Joy, a title that captured the momentum and direction of the new culture of exuberance. 

Several high-profile public victories accompanied this increasing optimism: the spectacular successes of African American athletes at the 1936 Olympics, the 1937 union victory of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Joe Louis's 1937 and 1938 heavyweight championship fights. For the first time in history, Black Americans emerged as cultural heroes and ambassadors, and many felt a new pride in citizenship. 

In this book, Gena Caponi-Tabery chronicles these triumphs and shows how they shaped American music, sports, and dance of the 1930s and beyond. But she also shows how they emboldened ordinary African Americans to push for greater recognition and civil liberties—how cultural change preceded and catalyzed political action. 

Tracing the path of one symbolic gesture—the jump—across cultural and disciplinary boundaries, Caponi-Tabery provides a unique political, intellectual, and artistic analysis of the years immediately preceding World War II.

Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.