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Summary: A repudiation of the understanding of "prodigies," monstrous births in humans or animals, as signs from God.

An account of the mission work of John Marrant amongst the Cherokee.

Summary: An autobiography of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw.

Shipwreck on the Bahama banks with a quotation from the Bible (Job 33:14-16, 29-30) under it.

An engraving of Dante and Virgil facing off against a horde of demonic entities as they travel through Hell.

Shifting in time between the years preceding the Civil War and the years immediately following it. "Beloved" is the story of how an escaped slave tries to overcome the tragic death of her daughter. Morrison's lyrical narrative weaves together the supernatural and the tangible, and the result is a dazzling achievement and a spellbinding reading experience.

This view of the Belvedere Gardens and Courtyard at the Vatican is particularly important since it shows the courtyard as it was originally designed by Donato Bramante in 1505. Bramante's design offered an unobstructed prospect from the papal apartments (at left) through the length of the courtyard to the exedra, the semi-circular structure at the right of the image. This perspectival view was later blocked by the construction of a library for Pope Sixtus V in 1587-89.

A photocopy of a translation of a section of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney.

A woodcut depicting a monstrous fish purportedly pulled from the sea in Poland, which had the appearance of a Roman Catholic bishop.

Summary: In this book, one of the world's leading scholars on the history of religion in Africa shows how Christianity has been transformed as it has been adopted by black Africans, from the introduction of Christianity in the seventeenth century to the present. Richard Gray finds that Africans have not meekly accepted monolithic Western practices and interpretations but have appropriated Christian faith for specific needs and added to it insights of their own

Close your eyes--make the white gaze disappear. What is it like to be black and joyful, without submitting to the white gaze? This question, and its answer, is at the core of Black Imagination, a dynamic collection collection curated by artist and poet Natasha Marin. Born from a series of exhibitions and fueled by the power of social media (#blackimagination), the collection includes work from a range of voices who offer up powerful individual visions of happiness and safety, rituals and healing.

Summary: A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

Summary: A historical, social, religious, and natural history of the ancient world.

A carte-de-visite bust-length portrait of Sojourner Truth with the text [I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance./Sojourner Truth.] beneath the image. Truth is depicted wearing a light colored shawl and bonnet which is tied under her chin. She is slightly turned towards the proper right side of the photograph. The verso reads [Entered according to the act of Congress/in the year 1864, by SOJOURNER TRUTH,/in the Clerk's Office, of the US District/Court for the Eastern District of Mich.].

Summary: In the past few years, a new generation of progressive intellectuals has dramatically transformed how law, race, and racial power are understood and discussed in America. Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class.

A woodcut of the four beasts which appeared to Daniel in a vision. Each beast represented a different kingdom.

An engraving of the four beasts which appeared to Daniel in a vision. Each beast represented a different kingdom and is labeled from left to right: Roma (Rome), Grecia (Greece), Persia, and Asyria.

A woodcut depicting the Monk-Calf of Freyberg, which was born with a tonsure-like irregularity on its head, resembling the common hairstyle of a Catholic monk.

A map of the world including latitude and longitude markers. Personifications of the winds are depicted withing croulds surrounding the map and various monstrous creatures are depicted within the oceans.

Summary: The sermons on which this commentary on the Ten Commandments is based were delivered in Wittenberg in 1516-1517. This is the first work of Luther's to be translated into a modern European language. This is the first printing of the work.

A woodcut depicting the "Papal Ass," a monster purported to have been pulled from the Tiber in Rome as a portent of the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

A study of Haiti, then the French colony of St. Domingue, introducing a complex hierarchy of racialization with the goal of establishing a caste system based on skin color.

A map of the western hemisphere, identified as the New World, and the western coast of Asia. A spanish style galleon ship is depicted sailing in the Pacific ocean, and a rough shelter built of sticks featureing a dismembered leg is depicted in the general region of Brazil with the label, "Canibali".

An engraving of Daniel, flanked by a lion and lioness, the four beasts from his vision depicted in the sky on either side of his head.

A headdress carved from wood and decorated with animal hair, bamboo, iron, and pigment.

The story of how this obelisk came to be in the piazza of the Lateran spans three thousand years. It was first quarried by Thutmose III around 1450 BC and stood at the Temple of Amun at Karnak. When the emperor Augustus (27 BC-14 AD) had the first obelisks brought from Egypt to Rome in 10 BC, he had considered this one, but was deterred by the fact that it was the largest of all obelisks (being over 32 meters tall and weighing 455 tons).

This is a type of headcrest mask found amongst the southern Ika, a western Igbo peoples residing on the left bank of the Niger River (Kwale region) and Isoko peoples residing further to the south. G.I. Jones photographed such masks in the 1930s. In performance they are embellished with feathers inserted into holes along the back of the figure and across the feline figure at the top of the mask. Jones documented their performance in the Ogonya Play in Ogume village, southern Ika.

Summary: Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.

A mask made of wood, fiber, and pigment, portraying Mma ji.

Igbo masks are made in many styles, and their distribution does not necessarily coincide with a matching set of beliefs concerning mask spirits. For example, the Okorosia masquerades of south-central Igboland share overall style features with the northern Igbo masks of the Nri-Awka area, such as the white-faced "Maiden-Spirit Mask" Agbogho mmuo but the belief in Okorosia water spirits is borrowed from the Niger Delta to the south where water spirits abound.

Masks from the Cameroon Grassfields were owned by either the men's regulatory society (Kwifoyn) that shared power with the king (Fon), or by lineage groups authorized by the Kwifoyn to perform. Although all masked dancers in the Grassfields are male, they may represent either male or female characters. This mask represents Ngoin, the royal wife and a symbol of womanhood. The mask can be identified by the royal headdress that has an almond or oval-shaped protruberance at the top and a wavy or zigzag hairline. Ngoin dances with short, restrained steps to mark her royal presence.

A work on the process of reduction and inductive reasoning, the precursor of the scientific method.

A collage of portraits of "The Original Georgia Minstrels". Each portrait is numbered and their names listed: 1) C. B. Hicks, 2) C. Crusoe, 3) H. Easton, 4) S. Keenan, 5) J. Mills, 6) J. Morton, 7) J. Matlock, 8) W. Sanders, 9) C. (G.) Harris, 10) J. Thomas, 11) A. Jackson, 12) W. Wilson, 13) D. Bowman, and 14) Brown.

A woodcut depicting a hairy, bipedal beast, labeled as the "spook of the evil ghost," which is found in a vast desert beyond India in the land of Cathay. This type of ghost is said to lead travellers astray by mimicking the voices of their travelling companions.

A score for the piece "He's Up Against the Real Thing Now". The cover includes the tagline "Williams and Walker's Latest Comic Coon Craze."

A headdress carved from wood and decorated with pigment.

This mask, called Sowo (pl. Sowei) or Bondo, is a type commissioned and worn by female members of the Gola, Temne, and Mende Sande societies in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The Sande society is responsible for the instruction of young girls into adulthood. This process occurs in the forest under the guidance of senior Sande members and Sowo or Bondo nature spirits. Once they have learned basic female values and trained for marriage, domestic life, and religious, economic, and political pursuits, the girls are integrated back into the village as women.

Third album of gospel music by Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith.

Summary: An Irish translation of the Historia Brittonum ("The History of the Britons"), including the purported classical origin of the people as well as the legends surrounding King Arthur.

A score for the Virginia Minstrels song "Jim Crack Corn".

The Dogon migrated to present-day Mali beginning in the fifteenth century, settling along the Bandiagara escarpment. The harsh, remote terrain of central Mali protected the Dogon and shaped their culture. The Kanaga mask honors the dead and connects them to the living, in much the same way as the long cliff on which they live connects the earth and sky, and the vertical strip of the mask connects the two horizontal bands.

A poster reproduction of a painting by David Teniers the Younger depicting the temptation of the desert father St. Anthony by demons.

Seated to right, seen on profile, Flavio Amalfitano at his desk measuring a compass while reading a book; a globe and an hourglass also seen on his desk and a dog at his feet; opposite him, floating on air, a sailing ship and below another desk with books and an astrolabe globe; a large recipient filled with liquid and a stone at entre seen in the foreground, to left.

Print shows a Haitian military officer, holding a printed copy of the Constitution of 1801, standing opposite a bishop appealing to an image of God or Moses in the heavens, with other Haitians and soldiers gathered around. Includes remarque: Liberté, Egalite, République d'Haïty, showing two cannons, a liberty cap atop a pole, banners, and olive branches.

Summary: Aime Cesaire has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as likely to "figure alongside the Eliot-Pound-Yeats triumvirate that has dominated official poetic culture for more than fifty years." He was a cofounder and exponent of the concept of negritude and is a major spiritual, political, and literary figure.Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s.

A collection of the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Dlan, Médellus, Silacier : un peuple en trois personnes, le "petit peuple" antillais de qui la "gentillesse", la malice et la philosophie désabusée pourraient prêter ailleurs à d'aimables tableaux folkloriques.Mais on ne s'y trompera pas. La trame de l'histoire n'est rien de moins que la difficile recherche d'une vérité : à propos d'un tueur à gages (antillais) et pour venger peut-être sa victime (antillaise).

A woodcut depicting the four beasts described in Daniel's vision placed on a map, one each in Europe and Africa, and two in Asia. The beasts are placed in such a way that they surround the holy land.

Summary: A novel conveying the fictional tale of a young woman falsely accused of witchcraft.

Through bold color and aggressive imagery, predatory animal references, horns, and strange tubular eyes this mask is a visually intimidating presence that harnesses the power of spirits from the wilderness as instruments of proprietary control in the realm of the town or village. Their visual affect was only heightened during performance. This Wé mask presents a bewildering accumulation of animal references: a fringe of aluminum-silver pseudo-leopard teeth, wild boar tusks, and pointed ears.

Small delicately carved face masks with pert noses and childlike facial features representing male and female spirits (elu) appear in village masquerades among Ogoni peoples living between the Niger Delta and Cross Rivers of southern Nigeria. Many of these face masks are cut across the mouth allowing the wearer to articulate the jaw as the spirit speaks through him. The open mouth reveals narrow teeth, usually made of cane.

Baker perceives the Harlem Renaissance as a crucial moment in a movement, predating the 1920's, when Afro-Americans embraced the task of self-determination and in so doing gave forth a distinctive form of expression that still echoes in a broad spectrum of 20th-century Afro-American arts.

A woodcut depicting a monstrous fish purportedly pulled from the sea in Poland, which had the appearance of a Catholic monk.

A woodcut depicting two boys, one born with four [feet] and one born without hands or eyes and the lower body of a fish. These beings are described in the text as being portents of the coming of Islam, implying that Islam was a danger to Christians.

In this 1939 novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith. Narrated in a mixture of biblical rhetoric, black dialect, and colloquial English, Hurston traces Moses's life from the day he is launched into the Nile river in a reed basket, to his development as a great magician, to his transformation into the heroic rebel leader, the Great Emancipator.

A colored illustration of T. D. Rice as Jim Crow.

A description of the customs of indigenous peoples of the Americas as recorded by colonizing forces.

The print depicts the cavalcade accompanying Pope Clement XI from the Vatican Basilica to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome on April 10, 1701

Painting of a mask.

One of three crosses making different zones across a two-acre field at the Saint Paul Spiritual Holy Temple in Memphis, Tennessee.

A group photo of participants in the Revival Forum 2023: Changed Understanding of Revival held in Seoul in the summer of 2023. The forum featured notable attendees and speakers, including: Dr. Helen Jin Kim, Bishop Yun-soo Chung, Rev. Dr. Hong-ki Kim, and Rev. Dr. Young-seok Seo.

Passport application no. 44349 for Joseph L Gerdine and E D Gerdine, issued in 1911.

Passport application no. 63634 for Joseph Lumpkin Gerdine, issued in 1908.

Passport application no. 265091 for Joseph Lumpkin Gerdine, issued in 1923.

Passport application no. 44440 for Joseph Lumpkin Gerdine and Eleanor D, issued in 1921.

Passport application no. 16881 for Joseph Lumpkin Gerdine and Eleanor Daisy Dye Gerdine, issued in 1918.

Summary: Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority. Artists covered include: John Coltrane, Ntozake Shange, Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, and Michael Harper.

Summary: A metrical Latin version of a traditional didactic Christian text in the form of a bestiary.

The lower third of Falda's plan shows the Belvedere Court designed in 1505 by Donato Bramante for Pope Julius II (1503-1513) to link the palace with a fifteenth-century villa on the grounds. The small courtyard (no. 9 on the plan) at the lower right housed the incomparable collection of ancient sculpture begun by Pope Julius which included such works as the Laocoon.

In Playing the Changes, Craig Hansen Werner presents a polyrhythmic approach to the continuities and discontinuities of the American literary tradition. He focuses on the relationship between two superficially distinct traditions: European (post)modernism and African American culture in both literary and musical forms.

Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne.

Portrait of Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, the first black minister who was educated in the Netherlands, with his hand on the Bible. He was a minister at Fort Elmina, in his homeland, present-day Ghana. Below the portrait is a ten-line verse.

On this 16-track collection we get to hear some legendary artists perform the great compositions from "the father of gospel music." Includes Take My Hand, Precious Lord Marion Williams; When the Gates Swing Open Dixie Hummingbirds; (There'll Be) Peace in the Valley R. H. Harris; Highway to Heaven Alex Bradford (with Dorsey on piano), and others.

A map of the world with latitude and longitude markers as it was known during the Ptolemaic period, including mountain ranges and rivers and spanning from Europe, to central Africa, and over to India. Personifications of the winds are depicted within the clouds surrounding the map.

Summary: The Sixth Edition of this innovative text written by Derrick Bell continues to provide students with insight into the issues surrounding race in America and an understanding of how the law interprets those issues as well as the factors that directly and indirectly influence the law. The first casebook published specifically for teaching race related law courses, Race, Racism, and American Law is engaging, offering hard-hitting enlightenment, and is an unparalleled teaching tool. (Publisher's description.)

Summary: Moral reform movements targeting racial minorities have long been central in negotiating the relationship between race and class in the United States, particularly in periods of large scale social change.

Summary: A map of Rome including illustrations of historic buildings and churches of the city; and also includes names and insignia of the 14 regions of the city of Rome.

A photographic reproduction of a drawing by Johannes Woudanus of the library at Leiden University, showing the organization of materials by topic.

Summary: In Rituals of Resistance Jason R. Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. The choice of these two sites mirrors the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through the ports of Charleston and Savannah.

This landmark history of slavery in the South—a winner of the Bancroft Prize—challenged conventional views of slaves by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in slave society. Rather than emphasizing the cruelty and degradation of slavery, historian Eugene Genovese investigates the ways that slaves forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through culture, music, and religion.

Miles Davis originally began recording this album in 1985. It marked a radical departure from his usual sound with the inclusion of funk and soul grooves. However, it was shelved and left unheard and untouched for 30 years. Now it has been completed.

Summary: A collection of the works of Saint Isidore, of Seville.

Summary: A philosophical work discussing issues of faith versus unbelief through the symbolism of two societies, "The City of God" and "The City of Man".

Nine inch nails driven through walls from inside the building compose a uniform grid, protecting unknown contents within.

A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Chapter 2 of Title 21 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to elections and primaries generally, so as to provide that persons or entities that mail absentee ballot applications shall mail such applications only to eligible registered electors who have not already requested, been issued, or voted an absentee ballot; to require certain comparisons to remove improper names from mail distribution lists; to provide for sanctions for violations; to provide for related matters; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.

A woodcut depicting Martin Luther as a seven-headed monster, critiquing his deviation from Catholicism. Each head is labeled (from left to right): Doctor, Martinus, Luther, Ecclesiast, Schwirmer [Schwärmer], Visitieter, and Barrabas. This was a classic piece of Catholic propaganda, portraying Luther not only as a Doctor and Churchman, but as a Turk, a wild enthusiast (Schwarmer) and "Barrabas."

The first track on the 1959 album Kind of Blue by American trumpeter Miles Davis.

A portrait of Sojourner Truth.

Chantae Cann ; with vocal and instrumental acc. Recorded at Spotlight Studios.

Summary: The memoirs of Job, a man sold into slavery in Maryland and later England.

Painting of a mask. Image courtesy of the artist, Aaron Henderson, and ZuCot Gallery

A journal, devoted to the interests of Southern agriculture; designed to improve the mind, and elevate the character of the tillers of the soil, and to introduce a more enlightened system of culture.

Summary: The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations of humanness. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis is a critical genealogy of Wynter's work, highlighting her insights on how race, location, and time together inform what it means to be human.

A woodcut of the first Beast mentioned in Revelations, which emerged from the sea. It has seven heads and ten horns.

A woodcut of the two beasts mentioned in Revelations. On the right, is the seven-headed beast from the sea. On the hill in the background is the "lamb-horned" beast from the earth.

An engraving of the two beasts mentioned in Revelations. On the left, is the seven-headed beast from the sea. On the hill to the right is the "lamb-horned" beast from the earth.

Summary: Copiously illustrated scrap-book on folk culture of Black people from early days of slavery through the present. Includes photographs, illustrations, advertisements, plans, form documents, sheet music, and more all printed in facsimile.

A set of scores for the Crow Quadrilles, composed de capo for the piano.

Decision in the case of the slave, Dred Scott, vs. John F. A. Sandford, his master.

An annual guidebook for African-American roadtrippers.

Summary: Collaborating on The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay have compiled what may be the definitive collection of its kind. Organized chronologically, the massive work gathers writings from six periods of black history: slavery and freedom; Reconstruction; the Harlem Renaissance; Realism, Naturalism and Modernism; the Black Arts Movement and the period since the 1970s.

Summary: This collection of essays by scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," and offers powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of moral, social, political, and economic equality.

An engraving of the four beasts which appeared to Daniel in a vision rising from the sea.

In the history of recorded blues and spirituals, there is no greater singer and songwriter than Blind Willie Johnson. With a vocal delivery ranging from raw rage to tenderness wedded to his talking guitar, Blind Willie's recordings are as powerful today as when he made them, from 1927 to 1930.

Summary: A collection of the works of Washington Irving.

Summary: An autobiography of Olaudah Equiano.

An exploration of African American history through songs, music, and speech with accompanying recording.

Summary: Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

Mechal Sobel's fascinating study of the religious history of slaves and free blacks in antebellum America is presented here in a compact volume without the appendixes. Sobel's central thesis is that Africans brought their world views into North America where, eventually, under the tremendous pressures and hardships of chattel slavery, they created a coherent faith that preserved and revitalized crucial African understandings and usages regarding spirit and soul-travels, while melding them with Christian understandings of Jesus and individual salvation.

Original records of seventy-nine trials at the Inquisition in Barcelona, Spain signed by the inquisitors. The text contains their declarations, confessions and the testimonies of witnesses. Crimes include pacts with the devil, sorcery, witchcraft, sodomy, traffic with ghosts, etc.

An image of Dr. Vincent Wimbush

An engraving of the dragon mentioned in Revelations, which granted power and authority to the Beast from the Sea and the Beast from the Earth.

An engraving of Daniel sleeping (left) as his vision of the four beasts (right) appear, each beast labeled with the kingdom they represent: Roma (Rome), Grecia (Greece), Persia, and Assyria.

A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

Summary: Uncovers the strategies early African American writers used both to create an African American identity and to make their visions and stories accessible to white readers. Beginning with Phillis Wheatley and John Marrant, who created popular literature by using formulas like that of the Puritan narrative, and ending with the subversive work of Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley, Zafar argues that black writers tried every literary strategy--from mimicry and masking to invisibility--as a means of promoting empathy and as a way of transcending the attitudes of mainstream America.

Three-quarter length portrait of Phillis Wheatley, seated at a table, with pen in hand; inkwell and book nearby.

A songbook of popular songs, jokes, conundrums, burlesque lectures, etc. related to Charles White's band of serenaders.

Frantz Fanon may be most known for his more obviously political writings, but in the first instance, he was a clinician, a black Caribbean psychiatrist who had the improbable task of treating disturbed and traumatized North African patients during the wars of decolonization. Investigating and foregrounding the clinical system that Fanon devised in an attempt to intervene against negrophobia and anti-blackness, this book rereads his clinical and political work together, arguing that the two are mutually imbricated.

The journal of William Dunbar from 1804-1805. He was a southern Mississippi planter. The journal casts light on and details relations of power including performances between plantation slavers and enslaved. It shows how both parties lived and at least provokes imaginings about sentiments.

A portrait of Kyeong Ah Min taken during an interview with Sangeon Kim.

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