Playing the Numbers
Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars
by Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, & Graham White
ISBN: 9780674051072
$26.95 Hardcover
Harvard University Press

The most ubiquitous feature of Harlem life between the world wars was the game of "numbers." Thousands of wagers, usually of a dime or less, would be placed on a daily number derived from U.S. bank statistics. Playing the Numbers tells the story of this illegal form of gambling and the central role it played in the lives of African Americans who flooded into Harlem in the wake of World War I.

A Home Elsewhere
Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama
by Robert B. Stepto
ISBN: 9780674050969
$22.95 Hardcover
Harvard University Press

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert B. Stepto sets canonical works of African-American literature in conversation with Obama's Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass's Narrative to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

Setting Down the Sacred Past
African-American Race Histories
by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp
ISBN: 9780674050792
$29.95 Hardcover
Belknap Press

As early as the 1780s, African Americans told stories that enabled them to survive and even thrive in the midst of unspeakable assault. Tracing previously unexplored narratives from the late 18th-century to the 1920s, Laurie Maffly-Kipp brings to light an extraordinary trove of sweeping race histories that African Americans fashioned to restore meaning and purpose to their lives in the face of relentless oppression.