Teen / Adult Crossover

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him--most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear ... In [this book], Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police.

An eleven-year-old black girl prays for her eyes to turn blue so people will consider her beautiful.

Dana, a modern African-American woman, is is snatched abruptly from her home in 1976 California and transported to the antebellum South in order to save the life of a white slave owner.

Criticizes the way history is presented in current textbooks, and suggests a fresh and more accurate approach to teaching American history.

Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown have brought twenty organizers and activists together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres -- sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism -- but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be.